Try Not to Scream
by MidnightFlyte
Summary: In an alternate universe, Jeb brought Ari with him to the E-shaped house. In an alternate universe, Ari grew up with a family. But there are some things that span universes - and the determination of the School to bring back their own is one of these things.
1. Chapter 1

The forest that he runs through is dark and completely silent, save the crashing footfalls of his pursuers and the sound of air scratching inside his lungs. As his legs pump as fast as he can make them, he's scratched by twigs and lacerated by the low-hanging, whip-like branches of limber pines. He can feel his legs want to give out from the strain, but he doesn't dare stop.

If he stops, he'll be taken back. They'll kill him most likely, because he's utterly worthless. A puny seven-year-old, no special powers whatsoever. The only reason he's alive now is because of Jeb, and Jeb is nowhere to be seen. His breath comes in harsh pants, and a stitch rips its way up his right side. As he continues sprinting into the darkness, he hears barks. For a second, he's convinced that it's the wolves, but his mind quickly identifies them as just dogs.

_Just _dogs? If they catch him, he's just as dead. And dogs have no concept of euthanasia. He runs ever faster, pushing his legs more. He can barely breathe, and, as such, he doesn't notice how the low brush of the forest gives way to crumbling dirt beneath his feet until he skids to the edge of a cliff. It's a straight drop down, not punctuated by the small ledges common to less harsh mountains.

_No_.

His pursuers have caught up by now, and they're ten feet behind him. One aims a rather nasty-looking gun at him, the barrel jet black and as emotionless as the holder, and he can hear the _click _of the safety coming off. The dogs kept pursuit in the only way they knew how, and they're bolding toward him at breakneck speed. He can feel the hot, rancid breath of the lead one on his neck, as he jumps into the open air.

Jumping wasn't a choice or a decision; it was a reflex.

For a split second, there's this feeling of weightlessness that lifts his stomach up to his chest, and then gravity asserts itself on his fragile frame. He's plummeting towards the rock ground thousands of feet below, loose skin pulled into an irregular shape by the wind as he falls through the sky. He twists his head back to look at his pursuers. The dogs have stopped at the edge of the cliff, but the guards who chased him are priming their guns and taking aim.

As he watches, a sinisterly bright red dot appears on his shoulder. He watches in horror, unable to do anything but fall to his death as the laser centers squarely on his back. The ground is getting closer with every second, the wind is ripping at his arms with a fierce cold like frozen knifes, and …

Ari Batchelder's eyes jerk open, and he sits upright in an unconscious motion that takes less than a second. His heart is racing, and he hugs his knees to his chest and shivers. The room he's in is cold and dark, and he's alone with his fear.

**Six years previous**

The five of them are seated around a square metal table. The lighting—fluorescent, the cheapest they could find—casts a harsh glow on everything, making it seem more intense, as it should be. What they are about to do here is to completely revise a plan that's been ironclad for _years_. Anne is the one to voice everybody's concerns. "Jeb," she says, crossing her legs at the ankle, "are you positive that this will work?"

Jeb sighs, and pushes his glasses up his nose. They're small spectacles, and they have the ability to make him look like an English professor approaching the retirement age. "It's our only option, Anne. If we want them to mature correctly, they can't do it here. Have you seen Experiment Six? She'll be scarred for life before she's a toddler!"

"Experiment Six is a month old, Dr. Batchelder." The eldest man at the table is Hispanic, thickset with gray hair. "It is possible to delay your leave of absence for another month or two, just to ensure that all of your projects have reached completion. Leaving so abruptly, to be frank, is a completely hare-brained idea that can only lead to disaster."

"It's our only option, Dr. Garcia. Itex is beginning to look into our logs, our files. It's only a matter of time before they find some mis-wording in reference to the Angel Experiment. And if they do, then investigations will follow and we'll all die. We have the backups stored here, and they can remain here, but the Flock _must _leave the School. Immediately."

"Jeb, aren't you being just a _little _melodramatic?"

"Agent Walker. My top priority is Maximum's and her Flock's safety. And a situation as dire as this is one that necessitates prevention." Jeb fixes Anne with a steely glare.

"Dr. Batchelder?" The quiet brunette speaks up for the first time she's entered the room. "We weren't, um, saying that you _couldn't _move the Flock. It was just, ah, just that it might not be a good idea to move them right this instant. But of course, if you think it's a better idea …" She shrinks back into her chair, trying to hide from Jeb's inquisitive gaze. "… You know, to move them immediately, then, uh, you just need to make sure that everything is … um, finalized. All of the projects that you're working on."

This convoluted agreement is completed with a quick, nervous smile. Sally Johnson, one of the most junior members of the School's staff, still remains in a constant sate of hero-worship to everybody around her, convinced as she is that her employment here is all part of some cruel joke played on her by the world.

"Thank you, Dr. Johnson." Jeb reaches into his leather briefcase, and pulls out a thick file. "Here are the lab reports for the experiments in apoptosis." Another, much thinner, file comes out of the briefcase. "Here are the notes on care, feeding, and exercise for all living experiments under my care. I will be taking Maximum, her Flock, and Ari to the pre-planned location in Colorado by tomorrow. We will leave tonight. Are there any questions?"

Voices fill the air as all the scientists pitch their suspicions and exclamations.

"When do you plan on coming back?"

"Why did you not inform us of this decision earlier?"

"How do you plan to stay in contact with your colleagues?"

"Jeb, mate, you still owe me a beer! You tightwad bastard!"

Both Anne and Dr. Garcia shoot a glare at the room's fifth inhabitant. A muscular forty-something man, Dr. Howard does not fit the mad scientist stereotype. While the others are clad in lab coats and suit pants, he's wearing a Hawaiian-print button-down (short-sleeved, orange and green), sneakers, and light brown pants. His Australian accent gives everything he says a hint of comedy, even when he's being completely serious.

"_Doctor _Howard, if you don't mind," Anne says, frowning slightly at her colleague.

"I don't." Simon Howard cracks a grin at Anne. "I was expressing a legitimate concern. I bet Jeb, dollars to beers, that he wouldn't last half a year after Six showed up."

Jeb ignores Dr. Howard. "I'll be back when I see that the Flock has matured to the point where they are able to not only function as a unit, but to also prove a threat to Itex."

"Wouldn't a psychologist be better equipped to determine that? We have several on staff …"

"And how do you propose that I convince the Flock to befriend a completely new authority figure in the day before we leave? Kindly remember that they do not see us as 'psychologists', or 'gene therapists'. We are monsters to them, plain and simple. And it's my duty to make sure that they see that there are shades of gray before I unleash them on Itex. Another adult, at this point, would be more detrimental than beneficial."

"And Ari? Won't he screw up your precious dynamics?" This comes from Dr. Howard, who earns himself a withering glare.

"Ari is my _son_." Those four words are all Jeb needs to clarify his point and the emphasis on the last syllable left no room for discussion. "I will not leave him here."

Dr. Garcia sighs. "Dr. Batchelder, this is highly unadvisable."

"Dr. Garcia. You yourself have seen the expense reports that are dedicated to the Flock. They're a multi-billion dollar project, designed by some of the best geneticists in the world, and they're destined to take down a company that's planning to use us to engineer genocide. Are you unwilling to ensure their mental stability and thus their ability to function? Experiment Three is already impaired, and Two is suffering what can only be described as PTSD. Do you want one of them to die before you okay this?"

"No, I suppose not," The doctor says, his forehead still creased into a furrow.

"Thank you." Jeb remains unemotional, and pushes his glasses up his nose once more. "I will bring my laptop computer with me, as well as the identification fob. I will keep you up to date on all progress that we make. The Flock will not know about this, of course. As far as why I did not inform you earlier …" he shrugs, "I scheduled this discussion so it would not conflict with my time spent with the Flock. It is essential that Maximum and the others trust me."

"Tonight, then." Anne stands, and brushes her pants off lightly before shaking Jeb's hand. "Goodbye, Jeb, and good luck." She walks out of the room quickly, and he can hear her inhale sharply, once, before the clacking of her heels against the stark white tile fades.

"I'll, um, send you the notes on their behavior, and I'll email you the footage of their group interactions," says Dr. Johnson. She tries the quick smile, and is met with one of Jeb's brusque nods. "I'll, um, go get the notes now." She almost sprints out of the impromptu conference room.

"T'be serious, Jeb, though." Dr. Howard attempts to organize his speech, and then continues. "It's a bad idea to take the kid."

"It's a worse one to leave him." Jeb turns to Dr. Garcia. "I will send you case reports annually, and check-ins every month. Do not attempt to bring them back. I know what I'm doing." He leaves.

**Present day**

Ari swings his legs out of bed, achieving a flawless fall onto the floor with an ungraceful _thud _as the blanket tangles around his legs. He wriggles out of the soft folds of fabric and tiptoes out of the room. There's no point in staying, not if he can't sleep. And Fang's no good to talk to, because he doesn't _talk_. Ari frowns, thinking. Gazzy and Iggy fell asleep around three hours ago … Angel and Nudge went to bed at nine … maybe he could just fall back asleep.

Somewhere in the dark Colorado Mountains, a wolf howls, lone and plaintive.

He slips out the door, heading toward the attic. As he tiptoes his way to the ladder, he hugs the wall, trying to be as invisible as possible, because instinctual fear reminds him that everything that was ever evil can see in the dark. And he can't see anything.

When he reaches the end of the hallway, he stands in the corner of the launch room.

It's a large, sparsely furnished room that has a wall of glass on the east side. The ladder hangs down in the center of that room. In the dark, it looks like spiders or aliens might come scurrying down it to devour him gruesomely, leaving his mangled carcass behind. And if he _does _pluck up the guts to climb it, well, who knows if it will hold? But when he looks behind him, the hallway seems impossibly long. The staircase is even further, in the other corner of the room—the idea of going there is inconceivable. Ari finds the courage to make a break for the ladder, pulling himself up into the attic room in the blink of an eye.

The attic room is no puny garret, but it isn't exactly a lofty penthouse suite. It's a decent-sized half-room with a roof that's six feet tall at its highest point—in the center—and slopes down to a mere four feet on the sides. The walls of the room are painted white, and the ceiling is a light blue. There's thick brown carpeting covering the floor, and a bed is wedged into the furthermost right corner. Ari walks toward the bed, and looks down at the girl sleeping in it. She's about fourteen, messy blonde hair and tan skin barely illuminated by the moonlight seeping in from the room's small window. He shakes her shoulder, lightly. "Max," he whispers. "Wake up."

"Huh? Whatizzit?" The girl cracks open her left eye. "OhheyAri. What time izzit?"

"Um …" The hesitating syllable told the entire story to the drowsy teen.

Max sighs, and stretches, pulling her body into a semi-upright position. "Nightmare?"

"Yeah."

"Mmkay." She shifts to the far right of the bed, and pats the space next to her. "You can bunk." With that, she curls up to face the wall again, and falls asleep in an instant. Ari clambers onto the bed and turns onto his side, looking out over the side. From this angle, he can see the gibbous moon outside the window. Suddenly, with Max nearby, the world doesn't seem quite so frightening. He breathes in, out …

"Seven years now. This is unacceptable." Anne Walker and Dr. Garcia are seated in a small cubicle office that's dimly lit by fluorescent lighting that runs down a room of similar cubicle. Anne sits in a cushioned armchair meant for visitors, and Dr. Garcia sits in the small wooden chair that is near the computer.

"Dr. Garcia, you yourself told him to take as long as necessary."

"That was before he became so close-mouthed in regards to the Flock!" Francisco Garcia stabs his finger at the screen of the desktop computer. An email from Jeb Batchelder is displayed there. _We're all doing fine_, it says. _No infections, wounds, ect. The eldest three are progressing quite nicely, and Fang (2) has come a long way with his previous trust issues. Maximum (1) functions as a _de facto _leader whenever I'm getting supplies, ect, and the others don't mind—in fact they're starting to see us as equals._

Anne Walker nods as she reads it. "Very clever of him. Keeping you in the loop while filling you with completely superfluous information. How long have the emails been like this?"

"For the past three years."

"Ah." She raises a suspicious eyebrow. "And you didn't see fit to contact any of us?"

"No, I did not feel the need to contact my _subordinates_." The last word has a clear emphasis, and Dr. Garcia fixes her with a steely stare before continuing. "However, this is one of the more verbose emails that I've gotten over the past six months. There's something that he isn't telling us."

"So you think it's time to bring him back?" She seems amused at this idea.

"I think the time to bring him back was six months ago, when he started holding back information. Dr. Batchelder is planning something, Agent Walker, and it's up to me to ensure that he doesn't do anything that stops the Flock from fulfilling their purpose."

"All right. What do you propose?"

"Simple. He'll come back if there's someone here waiting for him." And when Dr. Garcia phrases it that way, it's impossible to argue.

* * *

Yes, this is the Ari-story I mentioned on my profile. It will be updated with regularity, at the rate of roughly one chapter each week or two.(For those who care.)

Despite the amazing work of **Black Rose Heart**, this story is still a little rough. Your criticism is welcomed.


	2. Chapter 2

Morning in the Colorado Mountains is beautiful, an absolutely breathtaking sight. The sun casts rays of light onto the mountain's snowcapped peaks and seemed to sharpen the ice-covered rocky crags on the slopes, reflecting in a graceful micacle of nature through a window and right onto Maximum Ride's face.

"Gah. Make it stop!" She flails, covers her eyes with an arm and knocks the defenseless Ari around a little, causing the boy to squirm uncomfortably in his sleep. Briefly, she feels guilty about it, but she's too sleepy to care.

"Max?" The half-awake teen identified a strand of noise that sounded like Jeb calling from the foot of the stairs. "I'm making eggs. Get the Flock up, okay?"

It's too early in the morning for her mind to process anything. "Five more …" Her eyes begin to blink shut. Jeb sighs the age-old sigh of parenting the stubborn and climbs the stairs to shake her shoulder, hard enough to wake her up but not hard enough to hurt.

"Max!"

"Fine, fine." She pulls the blankets off herself, and scoots around the awakening Ari to climb down the ladder that leads to the launch room. Jeb doesn't follow her immediately. He puts his hand on Ari's shoulder as the young boy tries to follow Max.

"You're too old to do stuff like this, Ari." Jeb's voice is firm. "Max won't be around forever, it's time you got used to dealing with what's in your head."

"Yessir." Ari keeps his eyes on the floor. "I'm sorry."

"Just see that it doesn't happen again, Ari. You're growing up, now. You need to be able to cope on your own." As Ari watches, Jeb crosses the thick brown carpet to the stairs and walks down, Ari watching as his father completely disappears from sight. He waits until he can hear Jeb's footsteps leave the launch room before he stands and stretches. Just to be sure that he won't run into his father before breakfast, he makes Max's bed, tightening the sheets until he's pretty sure he could bounce a quarter off of them. He scrambles down the ladder into the launch room.

In the harsh light of the early morning, the launch room has a primitive sort of beauty. The light shines through the huge window, illuminating everything in the room to the point where it looks ethereal. This room bears no resemblance to the evil cavern cesspool it was the night before, full of ominous dark corners and looming shadows cast by pale moonlight. It's bright, full of potential. It's Ari's favorite thing about the E-shaped house, the reason he's up well before the rest of the Flock, to bask in the glory of morning light.

Speaking of the rest of the Flock, Max probably won't wake them up. He decides to do it himself, to make it easier on her. First is Fang, in the room that they share. Although "share" isn't an accurate word, it's too familiar. It's a room, and they both sleep in it, sometimes at the same time. Ari wonders, sometimes, what it would be like to stay up all night talking like Iggy and Gasman do.

"Fang?" He taps on the door firmly. "Are you awake?" He doesn't want to walk in and startle the older boy. Once, he shook Fang's shoulder and got a punch to the face for his trouble. And Jeb didn't even punish Fang; he just gave Ari a bandage! Ari can feel a sense of indignation building as he seems to be ignored, so he knocks on the door again. "Fang?"

"Yeah."

"Jeb's fixing eggs."

"'Kay." The door opens, and Fang walks out, heading for the kitchen. Dressed in all black, he stands out in the brightened space of the launch room like a crow against a stark white cumulus cloud. He heads down the hall that leads to the kitchen long hair swishing over his shoulders as he strides silently.

Ari watches him go, and shrugs. Fang will probably have the table set by the time he and the others get there. He heads toward the spiral staircase that goes down to Iggy and Gasman's room. "You _guys_! Eggs!"

"Chow! Excellent!" Gasman's up on the stairs in half a heartbeat, giving Ari's shoulder a friendly punch as he passes. "I'll save you a plate before Iggy eats it all!" The eight year old dashes down the passageway, blond hair catching the dawn light.

The boy in question shambles over to the staircase and takes the steps two at a time with ease. "Gazzy, stop lying. You know you eat more than I do," he calls after his companion, and then taps Ari's shoulder. "Come on, Max is getting Nudge and Angel. I heard her pass by a little earlier."

Ari doesn't doubt Iggy's ability to hear, because, well, he's _Iggy_. He has the hearing ability of a bat and then some. Still, once he's up in the launch room, he turns left toward the second staircase, instead of heading straight for the kitchen. The girls' room is the most isolated room in the E house, even more so than Jeb's study. To get there, he has to walk to the furthermost left corner of the launch room, open the door underneath the staircase to get to the stairs leading down, and then try not to trip and break his neck on the steep stairs.

When Nudge passes him on the stairs, she gives his hair a quick ruffle. "Heya, Ari! I hope the eggs are good today! Remember that time, when Max made eggs, and they were all burnt and I think the smell still hasn't gotten out of the—" She's walking backward as she talks, and her longwinded monologue is cut short by an "Eeep!" of shock as she stumbles over one of the slippery wooden floorboards in her socks.

Ari tries not to laugh. Sometimes Nudge can be really annoying, and it's nice to see her taken down a peg or two. As he walks into the room that she and Angel share, he's struck by how nest-like it is, compared to the rest of the E-shaped house. Their window isn't wide open like Iggy's and the Gasman's can generally be found. Instead, a piece of sheer pink cloth covers it, lending all of the light that comes in a slightly mystic glow. Angel's sitting on the bed, and Max is doing up the buttons on the back of her cutesy pink and white dress.

"And don't worry," Angel is saying.

"About what?" He asks, ignorantly stumbling into the conversation. She looks at him, startled. "Iggy eating all of the eggs?" He feels like an intruder, like he's blundered his way into a private moment.

Angel laughs lightly, trying to disperse the tension of the moment. "That too, Max. Come on!" She heads for the stairs, slipping past him and leading Max with her right hand firmly in Max's left. Ari holds Max's right hand, and the three of them climb up the stairs awkwardly, like train cars held together by thick woolen yarn. They walk past the launch room and down the hall, passing Ari and Fang's room on their way to the kitchen.

They're lucky, not all of the eggs are gone. The Gasman held true to his word, and he pushes a plate towards Ari. "Wif kechup," he gets out around a mouth full of food. He swallows the fluffy lump of egg and repeats himself. "With ketchup."

"Thanks." Ari takes the plate and sits down so he's facing Gasman. Something that he'd learned after one lesson—don't sit next to Gasman unless there is absolutely no other option, and never, ever, sit downwind of him. Max and Angel, unfortunately, aren't so lucky.

They sit one on each side of the blonde eight-year-old and chorus "Thanks," as Jeb hands them each a plate of eggs. Once he's determined that everybody has some sort of digestible nutrition, he slides down to his spot at the head of the table.

"Okay, gang," he says. "Today's Saturday, break day." Gazzy and Nudge take this as an opportunity to high-five each other in victory, causing Max to kick Nudge in the shin while making a "be serious" face at Gasman. Jeb continues as if he hasn't seen anything. "What do we want to do?"

"Manhunt!" The excited Gazzy calls out.

"Seconded!" Iggy says, since his marvelous sense of hearing made him almost unbeatable at the game.

"Thirded!" Ari says, as fast as he can, because manhunt is _awesome_. He and Gasman bump fists and grin.

"We did that last week," Nudge complains. "And it was boring then."

"You're only saying that 'cause you _lost_."

"Shut up, Gasman!"

"You guys did lose, though. You suck at hiding."

"It's not my fault that you cheated! Max, right they cheated?"

Max shrugs nonchalantly, forking into more scrambled eggs from the plate. "Booby-traps are fair game. Remember the rule."

Nudge crossed her arms and pouted. "Yeah, well, I think that we should amend the rule to say _no bombs_, because somebody thinks it's _funny _to have random bits of wildlife explode."

"How about strawberries?" Angel asks Jeb. "We can pick strawberries. They're ripe now."

"All in favor of strawberries?"

Angel puts her hand up, and so does Nudge, who shoots Max her infamous puppy-dog eyes. Max rolls her eyes, heaves a sigh, and sticks her hand up into the air, propping her head up with her other arm. Following Max's example, Fang raises two fingers about six inches above the table. Not to be outdone by Fang, Ari sticks his arm into the air.

"Tell me," Iggy says to Gazzy. "How many for strawberries?"

"Everybody," Gazzy says, holding his hand up. Angel smiles at him sweetly.

Fang shrugs, and speaks for the first time in about an hour. "I don't know, Iggy, we could always just stay inside and _watch cartoons_." In a single, fluid motion, Iggy picks up his half-empty cup, slips his left arm behind Nudge's head, and tosses it at Fang, hitting him on the ear and drenching his head with sweet, pulpy orange juice. Max kicks Fang under the table.

"_Not cool_," she hisses.

"I don't know," Iggy says lazily. "I think that orange juice was in the fridge for about a month. How does he look, Gaz?"

Gazzy just snickers, partially too delighted to speak, partially wishing not to get involved, so Iggy turns to Ari. "Well?"

"Like Fang, but with more orange juice." Obviously, this isn't enough for the blind boy, so he elaborates, "His hair is hanging into his eyes, and the top of his turtleneck is drenched. His neck's going to be sticky for a week if he doesn't—" Fang gets up, walks away. "—wash it."

"When Fang comes back, we'll head out." Ari watches Jeb, and wonders. He never really intervenes, not anymore. Most of the time Max is the one calling the shots. This scares Ari, in an inexplicable way that can only be explained as the terror of impermanence. Is Jeb setting Max up to be in charge so he can leave? Where would Jeb go? Would he take Ari?

Fang walks back in, the heavy black turtleneck having been exchanged for a black t-shirt over a black flannel undershirt. All jet black, of course. Ari wonders how he doesn't boil, dressed like that. "I have the basket," he says, and holds up Angel's "lucky basket," which she had gotten when she was about four. Nudge made it, her project for the day after reading an Internet article on basket weaving with cardboard. Ari doesn't understand why Angel didn't just use a cardboard box—they are the same thing, after all—but he puts it down to girl logic that will forever remain a mystery.

"All right, then, let's go!" Jeb stands up and heads for the door. Max gets up and follows him, reaching across the table to tap Iggy lightly on the arm. Iggy looks up at her, and there's an odd emotion on his face—regret, maybe resentment?—but it's gone before Ari can really tell what it is. He follows Jeb, slipping his feet into his faded red sneakers at the door.

All of them are outside and on their way to the strawberry patch when he realizes that he and Max are still in their pajamas, although Max is wearing her duct-tape reinforced combat boots. He stifles a laugh. Jeb, so normally caught up on precaution and preparation, didn't notice this! The knowledge that Jeb isn't infallible puts a spring into his step, and he falls in step with Max and Angel, who are discussing the various ways to cook strawberries.

"And there are strawberry shortcakes. Maybe I'll make you one for your birthday," Max is saying.

"_You _bake? Yeah, that'll be the day that pigs fly." Iggy's voice rings out behind them, loud and clear. Max whirls, her fists up, and looks ready to pound the crap out of Iggy until he points to a laughing Gasman. Her anger doesn't fade completely, but she rolls her eyes at Gazzy and shakes her head.

"You know I hate it when you do that."

Angel's reached the strawberry patch, along with Jeb. "Come on!" she calls. "I can't pick all of them by myself!"

"Max, guys, pick up the pace!" The sun flashes off of Jeb's transition lenses as he turns his head to look at them. "We aren't spending all day out here, you know!"

Everybody breaks into a run, leaving Ari behind. Even Gazzy, who's about the same age as him, passes him in a blink. Ari sprints behind them, going as fast as he can and jumping over rocks. He catches back up with Gasman, passes him. He's gaining on a jogging Fang when they all end up in the strawberry patch. Jeb's handing out baskets while the others are making short work of the delectable red berries that inevitably end up eaten before hitting the bottom of the basket. "Looks like you're getting faster," he says to Ari, ruffling the boy's hair with one hand.

Ari glows with pride from the rare praise. Maybe, just maybe, if he gets fast enough, Jeb will overlook the fact that he isn't as special and as tough as the rest. Maybe. After all, aren't fathers supposed to be proud?

* * *

Much thanks to **Black Rose Heart** for her marvelous beta work. For those who care, the update is a week late because of school. Both my beta and I were very busy.


	3. Chapter 3

The sun shining brightly in a baby-blue sky, the scent of summer grass, the fresh breeze on my skin, the smell of strawberries—pure bliss. I sigh happily as I pick strawberries, trying to place them in the bucket without too much force, so they don't bruise.

"Max, this strawberry is white! Is it an albino? Can strawberries be albino? They don't have any eyes to turn red, so maybe it's a half-albino, or some sort of mutant strawberry … maybe it's like those snakes, the ones that aren't poisonous but look like poisonous strawberries—whoops, I means snakes—and it's trying to look like a poisonous berry. Does that make sense? Are there poisonous strawberries?"

Nudge, the unceasing voice-machine. I heave a sigh. That girl could cause a saint to become a homicidal killer, even if she couldn't ruffle Jeb after three hours. "Nudge, if it's white then it's under-ripe and it's really tart. _Don't _try and eat it." A rather face-puckering sour experience with one of those ungodly little fruits taught me that lesson when I was ten.

Granted, the only reason I had it was because Jeb had specifically told me not to … I turn my attention back to picking strawberries, waiting for the explosion. Three… two…

"Maaax! It's poisonous! It's so sour I'm going to die!" Nudge quickly spits out all of the half-chewed strawberry. "Ick, ick, ick! Disgusting! Bleh!"

"Max did say," Fang responds, and she shuts up. For some reason, she's in a constant state of awe around Fang. Maybe his uncanny silence throws her off more than it did the rest of us.

Speaking of silence, I haven't heard anything from Gazzy _or _Iggy for the past five minutes, which must be some kind of record for them. I glanced over and sure enough, they are fiddling with something that Gazzy must have shoved into the pockets of his oversized sweatshirt. "Guys, what did Jeb say about that crap?" Just when I think I've gotten everything flammable, explodable, or remotely denotable away from them, we start seeing fireworks in the distance.

"He said it was fine as long as we did it away from the house," Iggy promptly responds. Just as I'm about to correct him with a reminder that Jeb said away from the _Flock_, I hear a sound that I've never heard before outside of movies and a few times Back There.

A chopper. Coming towards us. How?

In a split second, all of our eyes are on the horizon, except for Iggy, who's lifted his head and is listening intently. And sure enough, it's a chopper. I point it out to Nudge, who's gazing off in the wrong direction. Her mouth drops open as she catches sight of it. Her box of strawberries falls from her hands and spills bright red berries all over the ground.

"Why are they coming here?" Angel's voice, panicked in a way that I remember my own being. I want to hold her, to keep her safe, to ensure that she doesn't have to go through this. "Jeb?"

"Jeb?" I echo, because he doesn't seem to have heard her. His head snaps over, and he looks at me with an expression I've never seen before. Cold, hard eyes with a spark of something new behind them.

"Max," he says, "Take the kids and _run_."

By the kids, he means Angel, Gazzy, and Ari, the only ones small enough to get injured seriously here. The rest of us can handle ourselves against fully-grown men and then some. But why me? I look at Fang and Iggy. They're both standing, slightly tensed, ready to pounce on the first bad guy that comes near. Fang's head is slightly cocked, and he's tracking every move that the chopper makes with dark, determined eyes.

"No," I manage to get out.

Jeb's eyes narrow. "Maximum!"

"It's because I'm a _girl_, isn't it?! You're letting them stay!" I gesture wildly at Fang and Iggy with my left arm, holding Angel's shaking hand with my right. "If anybody should go, it should be Nudge!" _Or Iggy, because he's blind, after all_, I think, but I keep that to myself. Iggy can handle himself in a fight better than Nudge.

Nudge looks at me, shocked. "What? Ma-ax!"

I roll my eyes in exasperation. Even in times like this, it's like nothing changes. "Sorry, Nudge, but it's true. You're the youngest fighter here."

"Maximum, this is not the time for your petulance. Get back to the E-house, and _stay there_."

I cross my arms over my chest, pulling my hand out of Angel's for a quick gesture of reluctance. "Make me or go yourself."

Jeb inhales, exhales. Slowly. Just as I'm considering listening to him, the chopper comes to a stop ten feet above us, and the Erasers jump out. And then there's no time to argue. I race at the first one, a twenty-something-looking guy that's about as tall as me. As everything goes into fight speed, my mind pick up his military buzz cut, decent issued vest, and about twenty other details and files them away for further notice. He's still standing up as I tackle him into the ground, smashing my fist into his face with my best right hook.

An unseen bruiser pulls me off of him before I can do much more damage, grabbing me by the collar of my shirt and _yanking_. He moves his hand into position to snap my neck, but I don't give him the chance, getting out of the grip and kicking him where the sun don't shine for good measure.

Then everything becomes a blur. I smash his face into my knee, and somehow the first one jack-knifes me over, leaving me sprawling. I get to my feet, somehow, crouch, and tackle him again, using my foot to accurately strike him in the solar plexus. As his face contorts in a gesture of pain, I head-butt him, using my neck to smash the edge of my forehead into his—minimum damage for me, overwhelming pain for him. As my head throbs, he crumples.

_One down._

I stand up and see the second one as he's just about to jump on me. I have time to move my arm up as a pitiful sort of block, but not much. He still smashes into me, knocking me down for the third time in less than thirty seconds. There's a feral gleam reflected in his eyes, and his nails mysteriously elongate before I'm able to put two and two together to come up with an ugly problem staring me down.

_Not good. _Assess the situation, Jeb always told us. So while the Eraser who just knocked the wind out of me prepares to morph into a giant, bipedal wolf and, I don't know, _eat my face_, I take a quick look around. Fang and Iggy are covering Angel and Ari, and Nudge is trying to block punches made by a huge, already morphed one that must be three times her size. I can't see Gazzy. All I can hope is that he's started running. Erasers are fast—faster than us, on land. And if one of them catches up to him …

I pull myself to my feet and smash into Bad Guy Number Two's kneecap, bringing him down. While I stand over him, I strike his shoulder with a closed fist, hard and fast. _Crunch! _He howls in agony, which I give myself a second to enjoy before repeating the process with his other shoulder and smashing his face into my knee.

_Two down, eight to go._

There are seven surrounding Fang, Iggy, and the-kids-minus-Gazzy. I watch them for a second, trying to see how I can help, before one of them decides to make that easier for me. I recognize him—the one who punched Nudge in the face.

_Nudge! _She's lying on the ground, but she's breathing. Jeb's crouching over her, and he's standing now, breaking the arm of a still-human Eraser with one fluid movement—grabbing, twisting behind, and yanking up sharply. I nod, quick and grateful. _Okay. Nudge is good._

I tread carefully over to the main brawl, trying to be as inconspicuous as a blood-splattered teenage girl with messy hair can be in a battlefield. One of the Erasers near Fang and Iggy notices my approach. "Ah-ah, girly," he says, and grabbing my shoulders head on Before I can comprehend what he's doing, he smashes a knee into my gut. I can't help myself—I curl in, into the huge knot of pain that's located in my stomach. He brings his leg back, like he's about to kick a soccer ball, and my eyes widen. I try to move, but I can't. His knee comes swinging toward my face in slow motion, and I can only watch in horror until—

Blackness.

Ari's holding on to Angel's shoulder, tightly. He isn't stupid. He knows perfectly well that if he were to be killed here, he wouldn't merit more than a shoulder-shrug from any of the Erasers. He isn't the imperative here—capturing the Flock is. Why else would they send Erasers? So that's why he's holding on to Angel—she's not going to die anytime soon, and it might make killing him a little harder.

Angel's sky-blue eyes are wide, and her breath is coming in short little gasps. "I didn't know," she whispers to herself. "Why didn't I…"

"'Cause neither of us ever saw them! Or heard them or whatever!" Although the Erasers aren't making much noise as they pummel Fang and Iggy, Ari's heart is pounding so loud he can barely hear himself think over the repetitive thudding in his ears.

Then he sees it as if it's in slow motion. Fang's turning to his left, unintentionally allowing the kids to catch a glance at Max grappling with an Eraser. It takes less than ten seconds, and she's lying on the ground, her face a bloody mess. Ari's eyes widen in horror, and he points silently, as if sound has stopped working for a second.

"Max!" Angel screams, running out from the small space between Fang and Iggy. Ari follows, feeling like he isn't running so much as treading through an incredibly viscous fluid. His hand is still gripping Angel's shoulder, the knuckles turning white as his arm shakes from adrenaline and fear.

One of the Erasers grabs Angel, lifting her up into the air. Ari grabs the waist of her dress with his other hand, trying to yank her down, but to no avail. He's dangling about two feet off the ground, holding as tight as he can, feeling the fabric strain under his grip as Angel's high-pitched scream pierces the air like a dagger. The Eraser just laughs, a gruff sound between a chuckle and a bark.

"Aww, young love!" The mocking words are delivered in a harsh, growling voice and sound like something straight out of a horror movie. And then the Eraser throws them into the chopper.

"Fang!" Angel reaches out with a pale, small hand and Fang tries to grab her out of the chopper, jumping an impressive six feet up from where he was standing. But by doing so, he knocks into Iggy, sending the other boy sprawling onto the grass, where the two Erasers he was fighting pounce on him and pummel him, leaving him an unconscious mess of blood-splattered clothing and strawberry blonde hair. There's a nasty set of claw slashes across his chest, Ari realizes distantly as the freeze of terror takes over his system.

The other Erasers pick up their unconscious companions, and, while carrying the two-hundred-plus dead weights on their shoulders, execute flawless jumps into the chopper. One of them grins down at the two panicked kids huddled closely together. "Hey, little buddies."

Ari feels rage contort his features as he snarls at the Eraser, trying to mask his own fear. Angel does better. As the chopper begins to lift back up into the air with a deafening sound of blades slicing the air, she rolls forward past the Eraser, hesitating for a second at the chopper's open side.

Looking past her, Ari can see that they're over the canyon that passes near the strawberry field. If Angel jumps now, it's a five hundred foot fall to a rocky, unforgiving landing.

Angel leaps, falling out of sight before he can get out a warning. He pulls himself up and struggles past the Eraser. The wolf hybrid starts to notice and grabs him, and Ari can't reach Angel as she falls past. The Eraser's holding him now, nearly crushing his left shoulder in a vice-grip that could pull off a car door. "We lost one, guys!"

"Crap, can't you do anything right?" comes the condescending reply from the cockpit. Ari struggles against the Eraser's grip, turning to face the open side of the helicopter.

If he cranes his neck into the rushing wind, he can see Angel falling toward the ground, falling, falling … and opening her pure white wings and shooting up like a cork before soaring up to keep altitude with the chopper. Fang and Iggy are behind her, holding branches half as long as they are tall, and for a second Ari's heart rises in his throat from anxiety and hope. They look so tough, so unbeatable. Maybe he's not going to be kidnapped, after all.

Then, of course, everything takes a turn for the worse, like everything has today. The Eraser who's holding him slams him against the back of the chopper, where another Eraser grabs him and duct-tapes his mouth shut. The tight adhesive strip suddenly cuts off his main air supply, forcing him to hyperventilate without the benefit of a mouth. His hands are similarly bound behind his back, and his legs are secured together at the knees and ankles. The Eraser doing this isn't particularly gentle, causing tears to rise at the edges of Ari's eyes. He blinks them away, and struggles to get free, writhing like a snake in a desperate, futile attempt to find some way, any way to escape the grim future ahead.

He can't see the gun, because he isn't looking in the direction of the chopper's large door. But he can hear the sharp snap of fired bullets and he prays that it doesn't hit anybody. There's a thud, and a stream of particularly vicious curses that sound like Iggy.

Fall back!" Fang's normally apathetic tone sounds pained and distorted by whirring helicopter blades. Ari grinds his teeth together, and wills himself not to cry.

He knows where he's going. He just doesn't know _why_.

* * *

With much thanks to the ever-fabulous **Black Rose Heart** for beta reading.

All criticism is welcomed.


	4. Chapter 4

When I come to, it's on the blue couch in the E-shaped house. Nudge is holding an ice pack to my nose with one hand, simultaneously pressing another to her bruised cheek with the other. "Hey, Max."

I put my hand over the ice pack, struggle to a seated position. My nose throbs, and I know that I'm going to look like Rudolph for a week. "Damage?"

"Couple of bruises, bloody noses, cuts. Nothing major." Fang says. "You got the worst of it."

"I think my shoulder popped out," Iggy says, wincing as he rubs the offending area. "It's still sore. But it went back in."

I look at Nudge, eyes slowly traveling to her left, afraid of who might be missing. The Gasman's sitting on the couch too, his knees drawn up to his thin chest as he stares off to the side. It hurts to see Gazzy, my little soldier, so defeated. "You okay, trooper?"

"Yeah. I ran." He pulls himself into a tight ball as if to hide from judgment. "I'm sorry, Max."

I extend a wing behind , reaching out to the guilt-ridden eight-year-old, and wrap it around his skinny shoulders. "No, Gazzy," I say in a gentle voice, "you did the right thing. They would have torn you and Angel to piec—

It feels like the blood freezes in my veins. "_Where's Angel?!_" Did those bastards get her? Are we sitting here doing nothing while she's getting her liver prodded by a bunch of sadists in lab coats?

Suddenly, I hear quick footsteps, followed by Angel's voice. "Max!" She runs in through the door, only a little worse for the wear. She throws herself on my lap, hugging me. "I'm fine."

I exhale. _Thank you, whoever's up there_."Ari's okay, too, right? I don't think they'd beat him up too much." After all, Ari isn't special—he's just Jeb's son. He's not some illegal experiment in hiding like the rest of us.

Fang shakes his head. "They got him." Jeb decides to take this moment to make his presence known by climbing up from the stairs that go down to his study. He is holding a large stack of files and folders. Strangely enough, he seems unscathed, as if Ari is just upstairs instead of locked up in who-knows-where.

"Ah, you're up. Good." He sets the files down on the coffee table, spreading them out and paging through several of them. "I trust that you don't have a concussion."

"No."

"What are you doing?" Nudge asks. Strangely enough, she ends it at that, instead of chattering on about the question on everyone's minds. There is something about Jeb's attitude that doesn't bode well for any further discussion. Jeb didn't answer, he just hands a rather thick file to me before beckoning for Fang and Iggy to come over.

"You'll want to look through that, Maximum," he says. "Fang, you too." Angel slides off my lap so I could get up. Wincing at the sudden pressure put on my wounded joints, I hobble over to the table.

I open the file a bit dubiously, slipping the drawstring off of the nub. The first page I pull out is a black-and-white printout of a California map, with a route highlighted in red marker. The route has several origins—a hospital, a kindergarten, and a prison—but only one destination—a large blank area with the label "National Preserve/Government Testing Facilities."

Wordlessly, I hand the map to Fang and pull out the next piece of paper. A deed. I glance at it, not really understanding the wording in tiny print, before setting it on the coffee table. The third piece of paper is a map of the western United States. Somebody, probably Jeb, has drawn several carefully plotted red lines reaching from the North-West corner of Colorado to the area in California that was labeled as a national preserve on the first map. I take a deep breath in. Oh crap. "The School?" The horrible place where innocent children were morphed into hideous freaks of nature? The place that we were lucky to get out of alive?

"Yes."

"They took him to the School?" Nudge's brown eyes are wide with shock. She remembers what it was like there, more than Gazzy and Angel. The cages, the endless physical examinations, the horrible training … "But he isn't, like, an experiment! Why would they want him?"

"I assume that they have their reasons," Jeb says apathetically. "What I do know is that we have to get him back. And then we have to leave."

Leave? This place is our _home_. The only place that we've ever felt safe. As I open my mouth to say just that, Jeb gives me a look, like he knows what I'm about to say and he doesn't like one bit of it. "If they found us here once, they can find us here again. It's simple logic, which I hope all of you understand."

"All right, then." I square my shoulders. Leader time. "Fang, Nudge. Pack bags. We leave now. We'll come back with Ari," I promise Jeb, standing up.

"_Hey_!" This comes from Iggy, Gasman, and Angel, all of whom are staring at me like I just kicked an especially pitiful puppy.

"Don't give me this crap, you guys." I put a hand on my hip. "Gasman, Angel, you're too young. We're going to be flying all day, and you can't keep up."

Gazzy jumped up. "But Ari—"

"_No_, Gasman. Iggy, you need to take care of them."

"Don't lie to me," Iggy says bitterly from his seated position in the center of the room. He's been there since I woke up. "We both know it's because I'm _blind_." The way he spits that last word, it's like it's a festering eldritch curse.

"Okay, fine. It's because you're blind." I face him squarely. "And I don't need to worry about you getting killed _and _try to haul Ari over a couple thousand feet. In case you've forgotten, he sort of doesn't have _wings_."

"They had guns, Ig. Big guns." Nudge reminds him, her voice soft.

Iggy ignores her. "Jeb? You hear this, right?"

"Yes, Iggy, I hear it. Listen to Max. You're staying here." Jeb narrows his mouth into a thin line before speaking. "You guys need to work together, you need to trust Max."

"All right then." I head toward the staircase that leads to my room. "Time to get going," I mutter myself, half encouragement, half grim determination.

I'm in my room and searching for my "raid clothes," an all-black outfit that makes me look like Fang decided to restock my closet. I toss my old leather backpack onto the bed when I realize something.

The bed is made up neatly, the pillow fluffed and left on top of sheets pulled up tight and tucked under the mattress. I didn't make that bed. I stand over the bed and look down, biting my lip. _Oh_.

As I look under the bed for my left glove, my eye falls on a splotch of gray towards the space under the bed. _No … _I kneel down, pulling out the socks. They were once Jeb's, but I ran them through the wrong wash setting and they grew twenty sizes in ten minutes. Ari sort of adopted them, wearing them even though the heel of the sock rested on his mid calf. He claimed that they gave him good luck, and they somehow managed to not get worn to holes like the rest of his and Gasman's clothing.

That does it, worse than the knee to the stomach. Bitter memories of Ari smiling up at me, like that time last Christmas when I'd ruffled his head so much that his hair looked like it'd been attacked by a rabid gerbil, or when he and Gazzy would dash off to do God-knows what, a sneaky grin on his face. I curl up on the floor, shove my fist into my mouth, and use it to gag the sobs that come up. Tears and snot stream down my face, and my breath comes in short gasps as I try to get the crying over with.

It passes after about a minute, no sound made. I roll the socks up and shove them into the front portion of the backpack before grabbing the errant left glove from the crack behind my dresser. Wiping my face absently with my arm, I make a promise.

_I'll find you, Ari. You might not be _my _kid, but hell if I'm not your parent just as much as Jeb is. _It was too much to process right now; whether or not we'd get him back, what they might do…I shivered. Lock the feelings up in a box, deal with them later, Jeb always said. I zipper the bag and head down the ladder, slinging the straps on loosely, making room for the wings beneath them. I'm halfway down the ladder before I realize that I'm still in my blood-crusted pajamas.

It takes me less than a minute to clamber back up into my room to change into a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt. I pull several layers of thick clothes on over that. Jeb had always been such a nag when it came to bundling up. Getting tons of shirts over huge wings isn't fun. Don't try this at home, kids.

Of course, with big freaking feathery wings, we all had to, uh, modify the shirts. With a knife. Jeb had drilled us on how to do this, so we would blend in if we were ever in a crowd. He even taught Ari how to do it, and Ari prided himself on being able to cut shirts so well that Nudge, ever the fashionista, asked him to do hers. He even had a shirt cut in a similar way, the only one that Jeb allowed him to slice up.

Ari … who knows what they are doing to him? I head down the ladder for a second time, slipping my combat boots on from where they are at the foot of the blue couch, scowling at the new patina of rust-red blood on them. As I'm crouching, lacing my boots up, Iggy comes up the stairs that lead to his room, fiddling with something. I can't see what it is, but I don't like it. Usually, if Iggy's messing with it, that probably means it's going to blow up in some spectacular way or it's some of those really good pancakes he makes.

But frankly, I was lucky that he listened to me the first time. He and Fang have been getting a bit … different, more standoffish. Like they wanted to take Gazzy and form some no-girls-allowed Flock.

And, speaking of the devil, none other than the figurehead for teenage inner turmoil himself walks into the room. His backpack hangs on one shoulder as he shoves energy bars, packs of condensed milk, and bags of trail mix into the pack.

"Good thinking," I say as I straighten up, combat boots fully laced. I head toward the kitchen to stock up on food for myself. Flying builds up an appetite like nothing else, and all of us have pretty fast metabolisms—something to do with the 2% avian DNA that was spliced into us by mad scientists. "Nudge," I call out over my shoulder, "hurry up and get food for the road!"

Jeb's in the kitchen, something I realize just as he hands me a plastic bag filled with food. "Thanks." He nods despondently. "Jeb, are you …"

"I'm fine, Maximum," he says. His voice sounds rough, uncharacteristic for him. "Get Nudge in here?"

"I'm here!" Nudge announces, holding her sparkly purple backpack by the small loop on the top. "Angel wanted help packing," she explains. "Even though she isn't coming, she wants to be prepared. And she had a hard time picking a doll to bring, 'cause she loves all of them—oh, thanks, Jeb!" She shoves the plastic bag into her backpack and slings it onto both shoulders in one fluid motion. I narrow my eyes as I watch her spring through the kitchen, thinking. She seems to have gotten over Ari's kidnapping awfully fast.

I head out of the kitchen into the launch room, to pick up the maps that were in the file. Fang's already there, and he's studying a road map of Colorado intently. I gaze over his shoulder and trace out plausible routes with my eyes. Although the fastest route is always going to be a straight line, we're going to need to stop for food at least once. "You think this is going to work?" Fang asks.

"It has to." Nudge has come over to my side by now, and I ruffle her hair. "Ready to rock?"

"Yeah!" She heads over to the large window, opening it with the handle on the right side of the room. She jumps out, pushing herself away from the side of the house in one swift bound before spreading her wings. She's out of my line of sight by the time Fang follows. As I head for the window myself, I turn to face Jeb. He's left the kitchen and is looking over his papers, re-organizing them almost compulsively. He hands them to me and I slip them into my bag. Why the hell not? They might come in handy.

"We'll get him back," I promise.

Jeb fixes a hard stare on me. "Just go."

_O-kay. _I jump out of the window, feeling the wind rush through my hair. It immediately decides to whip around my face. _Note to self: braid hair or cut it off. _As I look down into the canyon, I think about how Fang and I taught Nudge to fly by tossing her out of this window. Jeb was so furious with us, but she learned faster than Iggy had. I spread my wings out with a _phoomp!_, catching an upward current and angling my body so I head up.

As the wind rushes around me, I feel the task ahead weighing me down. I'm the leader. This is all on me.

_We're coming, Ari. No way in hell are you going through what we did._

* * *

Late update because Sandy knocked my power out for about a week. Much love to **Black Rose Heart**, who puts up with my crappy writing and turns it into something worth the space on the internet it occupies.

Quick note: I pre-write chapters. There are updates coming regardless of whether you guys ask for them or not. Asking for updates is pointless. I'm going to update, and if I don't, asking for an update isn't going to _make _me update.


	5. Chapter 5

Flying is the best. Really, it is. The wind in my hair and the sun on my wings always manages to make me feel like a kid on Christmas morning. Not that I would know much about Christmases, aside from what I've seen on the television, but those kids look pretty dang happy. But today, there's no lightness, even though there's a brisk breeze playing with my hair and clothes—and freezing my nose off. There's no sense of freedom. The thought of what those psychos are doing to my little brother feels like a lead weight in my stomach, pulling me down even as I'm cruising at a cool 15,000 geet.

We manage about thirty minutes of un-interrupted flight at top speed before Nudge decides to open her mouth. "I hope that Ari's okay," she says, her voice low. If she wasn't flying a mere five feet under me, I wouldn't have heard a thing. "Max, they won't do anything horrible to him, right?" She twists her head to look at me, and her gigantic Bambi eyes take the moxie out of me.

I swallow. "I—" I don't know. Should I reassure her that Ari will be fine, and risk her finding out that they've somehow irreparably mutilated our little brother? Or should I break her heart now by telling her that the sick jerks at the School are probably torturing him now, out of frustration that they don't have any of us?

"We're going to get there before they can do anything serious," is all I can bring myself to say. But even that's a lie. When Fang, Iggy, and I were in the School, we could spend hours running on treadmills at breakneck speeds while scientists discussed heart rate, before bombarding us with x-rays or having us swallow radioactive dye. I mentally run a quick series of calculations. Judging from the position of the sun in the sky, it's been two to three hours since the Erasers kidnapped Ari. It's about seven hundred and sixty miles from the E-shaped house to the School, as the crow (or mutant) flies. Chances are that the Erasers are arriving at the School just now, or are several minutes away.

Our top speed is ninety miles an hour, about one hundred thirty if we have a decent tail wind. We'll have to fly for thirteen or more hours in a row, not counting a short break to pick up food. Ninety miles an hour is not fast enough. I bite my lip, and angle myself so I can get closer to Fang, who is flying about ten feet away from the end of my left wing, barely making a sound as he stares ahead into the sky. "Hey."

He looks at me out of the corner of his eye. "What's up?"

"Us." I can't help it—I'm sarcastic at my worst. Most likely it's a coping method.

"How funny." The corner of his lip quirks up a tiny bit and he rolls his eyes. "What's bothering you?"

"Honest opinion. Should I have brought Iggy?" I would never, ever let any of the Flock know that I sometimes doubt the decisions Jeb's been letting me make, and even now I lower my voice so Nudge can't hear me as she tries to fly through an incoming cloud.

But Fang—Fang's different. He's my right-hand man, my right wing. He's always been the only person that I can get an honest opinion from, and I need one right now. If leaving Iggy behind was a bad mistake, I'd like to know, so I can try to plan a way into the School without him. If it wasn't then I need to know so I can stop worrying about it.

"It can go either way," Fang says slowly. "On one hand, he'll be able to get the kids out if more Erasers show up."

"Jeb's capable, though." After all, he did teach us how to fight.

"Jeb can't fly," Fang says, ending my short-lived position of devil's advocate. "On the other hand, well, it's not going to be a piece of cake getting in without him."

"So I've either ensured the kids' safety or compromised us." Sometimes, I hate being the leader.

"Your pick."

"What would you have done?"

Yes, I'm the leader. Yes, he's a pain in the butt. But I'm still curious, despite that. He shrugs, and doesn't answer. I pull ahead, away from Nudge, and he follows.

I lower my voice so Nudge can't hear us. "I'm running through worst-case scenarios and transport time. How long until we have to come down for food?" I'm good with thinking on my feet and I'm an ace fighter. I'm not so good with planning. Fang can plan like nobody's business and Iggy can break into any place on the face of this earth. Together, we are the perfect emergency response team. _Too bad Iggy's back at the E-shaped house_, the snarky little voice in my head reminds me.

_Shut up_, I tell it. Maybe I need some council on this issue. I tune back into Fang, trying to focus on something other than my rising sense of useless, un-called for, and unnecessary guilt.

"I'd say that we're good for six hours, maximum." I smirk a little to myself, a personal in-joke. Fang continues. "We can eat in the air. But we're going to have to drop down once we run out of food. And we'll need to break when we get there, scan for entrances and plan a quick grab. Two to three days."

_Days?_

"No, nope, not happening," I tell him. "We can't do days. We need to be in and out."

"Then we need an airplane," Fang says, irritated. He dislikes being corrected almost as much as I do. "Because we're going to get tired." He glances down at Nudge, and I follow his gaze.

"She can out-fly you and you know it. Remember that time we played hide and go seek and nobody found her for the whole day, so we called Jeb and we thought she had been kidnapped?" He nods; I continue. "She was hovering. Eight hours spent making huge circles in the sky. What's our limit? Six? Six and a half?"

He shrugs. "She gets hungry faster." And it's true. Nudge is the biggest eater out of the six of us, something that will make her a liability on this flight. Although Fang and I are pretty big eaters, we don't feel like we're starving to death after two hours with no food.

"Point." I nod. "So, day and a half. Tops."

"Two days. We'll need to plan a way in, unless you have an idea already."

"Of course I do! We break through the freaking window, fly through the halls, grab Ari, fly out." Talking about the rescue like it's this simple relieves the knot in my stomach, and I can almost believe that it will be easily doable.

It won't, and Fang effectively kills that hope. In the conservatory. With a candlestick. "Hallways aren't wide enough for our wingspan. Remember?"

Of course I do, but I choose to argue my point, as a distraction. "Flying sideways."

Fang's eyebrow arches. "Carrying sixty pounds of dead weight? In an irregular shape?"

"Dammit. Fang," I keep flapping as I plan, or at least try to. "Could we call in a bomb threat? I remember seeing something like that on the news."

Fang looks at me, interested. "Bomb threat?"

"Call the cops, the news. Find out some way to get the School's telephone number, maybe it's in the papers Jeb gave us. Get to a pay phone, say that we're some obscure group of enlightened anarchists and we're going to blow the School sky-high. While everybody's scrambling around panicking, we grab Ari and then make like bandits."

"We'd have to do an up-and-away. In front of cameras."

"Oh."

Nudge flaps up to join us, and she keeps up a decent pace on Fang's left. "I don't see what's so bad with going public," she says. "We could get on the news, and say "look, they did these horrible things to us and we're just _kids_, and now they've got our _brother _and-""

I cut her off. "And we'll get put in zoos. Or "research facilities" like the School." I sarcastically quote the white-coats' name for their hellish establishment.

Fang makes a small sound under his breath. "If there was some way to draw them out into the open _without _exposing ourselves, it would be good. But Max is right."

Ah, my favorite three words. "So, Fang? Any ideas?"

"Wait a minute," is his only response, before he flaps up and ahead, using his larger wingspan to his advantage. I roll my eyes. _Boys._

The silence is nice, for as long as it lasts. It's punctuated by Nudge's voice. "Max, I'm hungry."

"There's food in your backpack. Fold your wings in, take it off, and then come back up." I demonstrate, snapping my wings in and immediately plummeting straight down, gravity pushing my legs back and curving my head slightly upward. As the wind forces the loose skin on my face back and tangles my hair beyond the point of no return, I wrestle with the straps on my backpack. It takes me five seconds to get the backpack off before my wings are out again, and I soar back up to Nudge.

"See?" I reach into the bag and pull out a cheese stick. "Easy." I peel off the plastic wrap and take a bite, savoring my ability to be a complete ninja in the air.

I do a double take. Wait … is that even possible? I glance back up at Fang, whose facial expression hasn't changed a bit since we left the E-shaped house. Despite the fact that he has the largest wingspan out of the three of us, he hasn't made a sound. _Yep. Possible._

While I'm ruminating, Nudge mimics my method of getting food out of her backpack. She takes a little longer, and she's laughing nervously as she makes her way back up through a cloud. "I thought I was going to go _splat_! Hey, Max, clouds actually aren't that fluffy to fall through; they're like a big ball of disappointment. I was hoping that they would be more … cloud-ier I guess, but they're really wet and cold and uncomfortable …" The only thing that shuts her up is the discovery of a chocolate-chip energy bar in her backpack. With a happy squeal, she rips the wrapper off and shoves the bar into her mouth, reducing it to mashed-up chocolaty goodness in a matter of seconds.

I head up to Fang. "Minute's up. Any ideas?"

"We go at night. Somebody breaks a window on one side of the building, causes a distraction. The other two go in on other sides, find Ari, and get out."

"The distraction's going to get caught."

"Yeah." He isn't particularly worried about this. "I can handle myself."

"Excuse me, Mister Fang I'm-Too-Cool-For-A-Last-Name, you are not going to get caught." I cross my arms over my chest and move over so my wings almost hit his on the upstroke, extending my right wing and whacking his left with it, hard. "We are a _Flock_, we stick _together_. None of this sacrifice bullcrap."

"There's no other alternative." He shrugs. "If we had Iggy we could hot-wire the security system, but we don't have Iggy. We don't have any way of pretending to be delivery guys because they're in the butt-end of nowhere. Any sort of big stunt leaves us in the limelight."

"Then we hot-wire the security system without Iggy. Or I'm the distraction."

"Objectively speaking, I have a better chance of getting away."

"What, because you're a _guy_? Is that what this is? Some sort of macho manly hair-on-chest thing?" I hiss these accusations, not wanting to disturb Nudge. Sure, we're ten or so feet above her; but her ears are just as good as ours. When he doesn't respond, I glare at him. "I'm the leader, Fang, and I am telling your stubborn, thick-headed self that we are sticking together or not going. And that's final."

"Fine." He's about to say something more, but Nudge cuts him off when she twists her head to look at us. There are crumbs all over her face, and she looks like she's a little kid who has just pigged out on cookies.

"Hey, Max?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you have a plan for how we're going to get in?" Nudge's eyes are curious, full of the eternal hope of the innocent.

"Of course I do. Don't worry about it," I reassure her. Because honestly, no matter how many flawed plans Fang comes up with, there's one that might just get most of us out of this alive.

A trade.

* * *

As both my beta (the epic **BlackRoseHeart**) and I are very busy with schoolwork, updates might be bi-monthly instead of weekly.


	6. Chapter 6

After about ten minutes, Ari abandons all hope. He can't wriggle out of the duct tape; he's kicked sharply by his captors whenever he tries. He can't roll out of the helicopter, since a sliding door was pulled down as they gained speed and the winds ripped past them quick enough to snap necks. Under the duct tape, he presses his lips into a thin line and wills himself not to cry as his eyes begin to water.

As a distraction, he analyzes his situation. There are eleven Erasers in this 'copter, if he counts the driver and the three unconscious ones. Of the seven functional ones that are in the body with him, there are two are situated by either side of the door. One is crouching in the back left of the chopper, about three feet away from Ari. This Eraser is fully morphed, and watching the young boy like a cat watches a mouse in a trap through spiteful eyes. There's another Eraser in human form standing in front of the short passageway that separates the pilot from the cabin. The other three Erasers are sitting on the bench that runs along the left side of the chopper, inspecting their wounds while casting the occasional glance at their hapless victim.

The three unconscious ones are sprawled unceremoniously on the floor, and the hand of one is not six inches away from where Ari's head lies. As he watches in horror, it twitches as the Eraser stirs. Ari jack-knifes himself into a seated position and curls into the right corner as far as he can, trying to turn himself into a smaller target. The Eraser in the left sneers, the feral grin making him look utterly insane. He says something, a sadistic smile pulling at his face, but his voice is drowned out by the thudding of the helicopter's blades as they slice through the air.

With his head pressed against the wall of the chopper, Ari can feel the vibrations of the propeller on the roof. If he had to guess, he'd say that they're travelling really fast—like three hundred miles an hour? If he wasn't being kidnapped, he'd think this was the coolest thing _ever_. He's always wanted to fly, and the rare moments when Jeb let him borrow the binoculars to watch the Flock practice flying or even just play air tag were like heaven, watching his family soar gracefully against a bright sky.

Once, Max took him flying. They were in the woods, about seven miles away from the E-shaped house, and it was getting dark out. The route back was a steep climb uphill, and—Ari screws his eyes shut, remembering—Nudge was with them, and she didn't want to get dirt on her absolute-best-favorite blue shirt. _Screw it_, Max had said, and Ari and Nudge had laughed at the forbidden word. She glared at them then, and then grabbed Ari and laped into the air, flinging her wings out and covering the seven miles to the E-house in fifteen minutes, Nudge hot on her heels.

It was the best fifteen minutes of Ari's life. The wind ruffled his hair everywhere until it looked like Iggy had tried to give him a haircut. The air suspended him as if he had wings of his own. He could look down and see the way his jean-clad legs and red-sneakered feet dangled down oddly, incongruous with the beautiful landscape beneath him. As he remembers the way Max had held his arms then—tight, so he wouldn't fall, but loose enough to allow blood to flow to his arms—he can feel his throat choke up and he blinks rapidly, trying to banish the tears that are welling up at the thought of Max.

Max, so tough and strong. Max, lying motionless on the grass, her nose a bloody mess. Max, accidentally deep-frying a cheese sandwich when she wanted to grill it. Max, and the odd way she crumpled, like a puppet with its strings cut, when she was kneed in the face.

Ari sucks in air through his nose and bites his cheek hard to stop from crying. It works, but the taste of copper soon fills his mouth. He blinks to banish the rest of the tears and tries to focus on something other than the impossibility of escape and Max.

His mind settles on rescue. How long until the Flock comes for him? Will they? Jeb might decide that it's too big of a risk to send Max and the others. Ari's hopes fall even further, burrowing into the bedrock of despair that they had previously only rested on. _No_, he decides, the Flock is _probably _coming.

But in the meantime, he'll be trapped in the School. He shudders, his head knocking against the metal of the helicopter's cabin wall. Max had told him about it once—the cramped beds and the cages, the grueling tests and the constant examinations, and the overwhelming stench of antiseptic and harsh white lights. As Ari wonders whether he'll be dissected like a frog or put into a huge maze like a rat, he slowly dozes off, finding a comforting rhythm in the helicopter's unsteady shaking.

He half-sleeps for what feels like ages; occasionally jolted awake when the copter hits a pocket of opposing air. As the helicopter begins to descend, the turbulence increases, making the air force them back up. Ari's head is banged against the wall of the copter dozens of times, and he unintentionally bites his tongue hard enough. More blood fills his mouth, but the duct tape over his lips prevents him from spitting it out.

He swallows it instead, gagging on the metallic taste. He can feel a bruise forming on his left temple, and his feet have fallen asleep after being bound together for what feels like _years _but has only been a few hours.

The helicopter touches down, blades barely ceasing their spin as the hatch opens. The Eraser in the back of the chopper grabs Ari's shoulder with a hand the size of a baseball mitt. "Don't get any funny ideas," the Eraser cautions, and then chuckles. He drags Ari out of the 'copter, past the others, and slings the small boy over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. "You morons coming?"

"Ah, _fuck _you!" One of the Erasers who stood guarding the door steps out. He's wearing the same outfit as the rest of them—military fatigues and heavy boots—and a black jacket. As Ari shakes the dizziness and sleep out of his head, the Eraser pulls a cell phone out of the pocket of the jacket and punches a few keys. "Boss? Yeah, it's the A-Team. We've got the kid."

Ari looks around, keeping his ears open and trying to record the conversation at the same time. They're in the middle of nowhere, literally. They're surrounded by grass, and there isn't a building in sight for miles. If he squints into the horizon, he can see cars driving by, presumably on a highway. He has no idea where he is. He is tied up too tightly to move, and there is no way for him to get home. He has no idea where the Flock is—if they've even left the E-shaped house.

"What? _Her_? No, the short one." The Eraser speaking into the phone looks as if he's on the verge of cursing. He runs his right hand over his blond stubble and frowns. "Batchelder's kid. We're just outside Fresno. Yes, sir. Yes, okay." He hits a button on the phone and shoves it back into his pocket before walking over to one of the Erasers that's standing near the helicopter, the one that grabbed Ari and Angel.

The leader growls. "Nice _job_, moron. We were supposed to grab the chick!"

"How the hell was I supposed to know?! You never tell us anything!" The Eraser who yells back has red hair and pale skin covered with freckles. He's a couple inches shorter than the blond man that's berating him viciously.

"I knew you would screw it up!" The blond roars, barreling towards him as they start fighting with teeth and claws. Everybody turns to watch. The Eraser holding Ari drops him on the ground, joining the others as they either try to break up the fight or throw a few punches themselves. Ari's already-bruised head hits the unyielding ground with a thud, and the young boy grits his teeth.

As he tries to get himself into an upright position, to try to retain some of his dignity, he notices the huge black truck coming towards them, driving across the grass. The Erasers don't, they're too busy brawling. Ari spares them a half a glance, noting that almost all of them are morphed by now, and their aggressive shouts are enhanced by guttural growls. The crowd of fighting Erasers blocks out the view of the original two who started arguing.

The truck pulls up without anybody paying much attention, and Ari watches as a middle-aged man gets out of left side of the car. He doesn't look much like a mad scientist—unless mad scientists wear Hawaiian print shirts and rumpled khaki shorts—but Ari isn't sure of anything. This guy is definitely in some position of authority, however, as he walks up to the mess of fighting Erasers without a care in the world.

"And just _what _do you think you're doing?" The man has odd inflections on his words, something that Ari can't quite place.

All of the Erasers freeze. It's comical, watching ferocious recombinants look like small children caught filching cookies. If his situation weren't so dire Ari would laugh. The man ignores the Erasers' attempts to explain, and focuses his attention on the bound captive.

"And why the holy hell did you do _that _to him?"

"Um …" The man who started the brawl tries to explain. There's blood on his face, his left eye is blackened, and his right arm looks like somebody bit it. "We didn't want him to try and get away?"

"Only a group of _morons _would be unable to keep an ankle-biter under supervision without duct tape. Untie him now." This man has a strange accent, and Ari can't quite place it.

The blond Eraser walks over to Ari and crouches down to roughly rip the duct tape off of his wrists, his ankles, and his knees. As the hybrid grabs the tape on his face and _yanks_, Ari looks at him head-on.

He wishes immediately that he hadn't. There's nothing in the Eraser's eyes but hate. As Ari stretches his legs out, the Eraser backs off and goes back to the group waiting at the helicopter with a handful of others.

The man speaks again, with a tone that reminds Ari of Jeb. "You will report back to the School immediately, and we will discuss your atrocious lack of organization there." He turns to look at Ari. "You're coming with me, kiddo." His tone of voice softens noticeably, but Ari's still petrified of him.

Iggy and Max told him about the Erasers that were back in the School. According to Max, they were the enforcers of the whitecoats' laws, created because no sane human would work for the School. Ari shudders internally. Anybody that can boss them around is not somebody to mess with. So he gets up and walks to the van on legs wracked with pins-and-needles from being taped together.

_Max would try to run_, the voices in his head tell him. _Max would beat up everybody here._

He remembers how Max hit the ground, almost in slow motion. He opens the van door and sits in the passenger seat, utterly terrified.

The drive to the School is silent except for the rough mechanical sounds that the car makes. Ari keeps his eyes on the road, trying to memorize the route that they're taking. He looks at the signs, but the van moves too fast for him to read anything. His hands clench into fists involuntarily, bunching the fabric of his pajama pants.

The man pulls off at an exit leading to the forest, and the van takes a few back roads, some of which are barely wide enough for the car to pass. Judging from the speed at which he drives, this man is familiar with the route to the School.

The van pulls up at what looks like a toll booth, except it's in the middle of nowhere and there's only one. Also, Ari's pretty sure that the people at toll booths don't carry machine guns or turn into wolves. The man pulls out a wallet and flips it open, showing an identification card to the Eraser standing near the turnpike, and the Eraser nods before going into the small booth and hitting a button that raises the bar so the van can go proceed.

The man drives up a short hill into a parking lot, parks the car, and gets out. Ari follows silently, keeping his eyes and ears open. _Assess the situation. _The School is a large white building that looks like the hospitals Ari's seen on television. There is a pair of Erasers at every door. As they go into the building, the guards straighten up and glare at Ari as he passes by, but maintain a respectful façade as the man passes them by.

The man turns into a large room. It's probably an office because of the large desk situated into the middle; behind the desk sits a woman with a tight dark brown bun and sharp eyes behind steel-framed glasses. The atmosphere mimics the room, harshly lit and completely white, the scent of antiseptic everywhere. He shows the woman sitting behind the desk the same picture that he showed the guards.

"Dr. Howard," the woman says, a little surprised. "This is?" She jerks her chin at Ari, as if he were a lost puppy brought in from the cold.

"A mistake. It was supposed to be the little girl, from what I've heard. Or the leader. We'll have to send out a secondary team."

"Yes, he doesn't look like either." The woman gives Ari a quick once-over, taking in his messy hair, his pajamas, and the harsh red marks that the duct tape left on his face. He tries not to breathe much. It feels like she's dissecting him with her hazel eyes. "I suppose I could put him in the room with the children, until Phase II initiates."

"Thanks, Adila." Dr. Howard grins at her. "And I haven't forgotten about Thursday. Care for a repeat?"

"Of watching you make an ass out of yourself because of sports while chugging nasty beer? Count me in." The woman, Adila smiles at him, then stands, brushing invisible dust off of her gray slacks as she walks over to Ari. "Come on, kid." She puts her hand on his shoulder and leads him toward a door in the back of the building.

Ari keeps up with her, and tries to memorize the route that they're taking. Left turn, straight past three doors, right turn … the hallways blur into each other as he tries to keep up with Adila's high-heeled shoes. After a few minutes of the lithe scientist walking and Ari half-running, they arrive at a room with a bright green door.

She holds the door open as Ari walks in. The room is well-furnished enough—about twenty bunk beds and some simple wooden wardrobes towards the left wall, with doors for restrooms to the right. It's painted a rather calming shade of blue, like a nursery for a baby boy. It's only slightly warmer than the rest of the building.

The door closes behind him as Ari's looking over the room. When he's absolutely, positively sure that Adila can't hear him, he calmly walks over to the nearest bunk and sits on it before curling into a small ball, shoving his forearm into his mouth to muffle any noise, and sobbing.

He's heard the stories. The experimentation was not common for the Flock, but Max told him about the time that some poor kid was fed radioactive dye and then kept in an X-ray machine so the scientists could find out how their digestive system worked. He remembers, faintly, the screams that he heard from testing rooms. And suddenly, he _misses _the E-shaped house, misses being overlooked by Jeb half the time.

He misses Angel and her girly pink dress and stupid teddy bears. He misses Iggy and his constant wisecracks and occasional teenage mood swings. He misses Gazzy, the closest thing he has to a brother. He even misses Fang and the way that the older boy is constantly there, a solid and unchanging factor in the Flock.

And he misses Max, her jokes and snark and smiles, the way that she's always ready to clown around with him or teach him the best way to execute a roundhouse kick.

He doesn't know if he'll ever see them again. This final thought, as depressing as it is, stops the tears. He slowly releases his arm from the grip of his teeth and wipes his face completely dry on his shirt.

_Max_, he thinks as he falls asleep, still curled up into a ball. _Iggy. Where are you guys?_

* * *

Much appreciation to the ever-awesome** Black Rose Heart** for her work as a beta-reader.


	7. Chapter 7

Exactly ten minutes after Max, Fang, and Nudge leave, Jeb grabs his laptop from his study. He sets the laptop down on the kitchen table, adjusts his steel-rimmed glasses, and sits down in front of it, typing like a madman on caffeine.

Both Iggy and the Gasman teeter on the verge of asking Angel what he's typing, but she shakes her head when they look at her, silently closing the discussion before it has a chance to begin. For some reason, she won't tell them what Jeb thinks. After he ignores the three of them for half an hour, they head downstairs to his study, where they can talk freely.

"This utterly _blows_," are Iggy's first words once Jeb's out of earshot. Angel glances up from her dog-eared paperback copy of The Sorcerer's Stone.

"Iggy." It's one word, but when said in the soft voice of a fearful child, it's all that's needed to reprimand the teenaged mutant.

"Sorry." He slouches further down on the couch in Jeb's study, the couch that they would all squeeze onto when it was a rainy day and Jeb allowed them to take a break and watch a movie.

"He's right, though, Ange." Gazzy looks away from the television that he was watching apathetically. "We're _stuck _here and Ari could be getting dissected."

"Or they could be trying to 'improve' him." Iggy air-quotes the second-to-last word before screwing his face up in disgust. "Because we all know how well _that _turns out, right?"

Angel sighs and pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them and rumpling her ruffled pink-and-white dress. "Max always knows what she's doing. If we stay back here, we hold down the fort."

"Maybe if we get rid of the Erasers, we won't have to move like Jeb said!" Gazzy exclaims, suddenly hopeful.

Angel smiles at him, and she looks much older than her six years, like a hermetic monk lives behind her baby-blue eyes. "Maybe."

"Hey, yeah! Let's booby-trap the house!" Iggy suddenly looks like he's regained interest in life. "And we can build some portable bombs too, just in case we run into those jerks outside." The blind arsonist steeples his fingers and scrunches his forehead up in thought. "Gasman, go get the box. Angel, I want you to go onto the computer and click on the folder that says 'Level Two Algebra for the Visually Impaired'."

Both of the kids hop to, Gazzy jumping off of the couch to run upstairs. He slides across the sun-warmed hardwood floor by putting his thick socks to good use on the smooth surface of the launch room. Jeb's still typing furiously away at whatever he's doing, a mug of coffee by his side. He doesn't look up when Gazzy appears from the study, disappears down the stairs, climbs back up them holding the large metal toolkit that holds all their carefully obtained bomb-building supplies, and then slides his way across the hardboard floor and disappearing into Jeb's study once more.

When he does get down, Angel is assiduously taking notes down on a pad of paper that was on the desk, while Iggy is talking animatedly, gesticulating to invisibly shape the device's structure in the air.

"… and it should be attached to a _big _alarm clock, so when the alarm goes off, it'll be like _bring-bring-bring_, losers, you're gonna _die_!" He punctuates this last word with a vigorous fist to the palm, before turning to where Gazzy stands at the foot of the stairs. "Oh, hey Gasman," he says conversationally, his glazed blue eyes gazing at a spot six inches above the eight-year-old's head. Close enough. "You got the box, excellent. Let's get to work!"

As Iggy springs up off the couch, grabbing the television remote with his left hand and pointing it over his right shoulder to mute the reality TV show, Gazzy wonders how the only blind member of the Flock manages to function so well. He does just as much as Max—sometimes more—around the house, _and _builds bombs, _and _babysits Angel when Max and Fang are bickering, or sparring, or off flying. It's uncanny.

But he's eight, and he doesn't worry much about these things unless they're right in front of his nose, so he pushes the thought aside and sets the box of carefully wrapped pipes, pipe caps, fuses, wires, gunpowder containers, pliers, and scissors down on the table. (There is also some carefully packed chemicals in that box—nitrobenzene, along with sulfuric and methyl acid, just to name a few examples—but neither Iggy nor Gazzy has elected to mention this to Angel. They might be pyromaniac mutants, but they aren't _stupid_.) "What are we making, Iggs?"

Iggy's grin becomes borderline maniacal. "Lots and lots and lots of _bombs_. Some small ones, for carrying, sort of like grenades? And some mines. Mines are fun. And we're going to do trip wires, on that cabin in the woods. _And_," he holds up hands, as if to silence an invisible crowd of applauding fans, "we're going to make a moat here, or at least trap ditches. But the big highlight is going to be Big Boy. We're going to make a timer, Gasman." The anticipation in the room is nearly tangible.

And then Iggy's eyes light up like Roman candles as his grin widens even further. For a second, Gasman is reminded of the way Nudge looks when she gets to go to the Goodwill in the closest town to get new clothes. "Gasman, go get the Mickey Mouse alarm clock in Max's room."

Gazzy is out of the room in a flash.

They've assembled most of the smaller pipe bombs and grenades by the time Jeb comes down the stairs. Surprisingly enough, he doesn't so much as raise an eyebrow when Iggy tells Angel to pass the black powder, although he does frown when he sees the small stack of explosives to Gazzy's left. "You guys are going to need to get your bags packed," he says. "We're going to go to the cabin in the woods."

"What? Why?" Iggy directs his sightless gaze toward Jeb, quickly glancing up through the fringe of strawberry-blonde hair that's fallen over his eyes while he worked on his bombs. "I thought we were fine here."

Jeb sighs heavily, and runs his hand over his graying brown hair. "We were, until I detected a GPS signal coming from two vans. Hacking into the GPS signal revealed directions toward this house. If we don't move, they could come knocking on our door in a matter of minutes." The three kids allow themselves a half-beat of terrified silence. Until now, it seemed like a battle they could win easily, one with a happy ending. Now they have to retreat to the defensive.

Gazzy stands up automatically, because when Jeb tells you to jump, you don't just jump, you find a trampoline. He quickly re-wraps all of the bomb-making supplies and stows them away in the box, closing the latch of the box carefully and holding it by the handle.

"Angel, there's a cardboard box in the kitchen to carry the bombs in. Gazzy will help you." When the young girl leaves, Iggy pushes his hair out of his face and turns toward Jeb. "Is it because, you know, you think I can't handle them? We could take them, you know." This is directed at Jeb, and Iggy's deferential tone doesn't completely hide the fact that the teenager is plotting a small mutiny. Gazzy can tell that much.

Jeb shakes his head. "I know you have enough explosives to stop them. It's a question of time. They can always call for reinforcements. We have to hurry." With that parting phrase, he ascends the stairs, his well-worn black sneakers making almost no sound.

When he leaves, Iggy stands and stretches. "All right, Gazzy, you know where our bags are."

The two of them regularly spend nights outside, setting up sleeping bags in trees and plotting the latest explosive device. It's much easier to plan when they can be assured that their youngest sibling won't be peeping into their heads out of curiosity or a desire to inform Max of their plans. They make these camping excursions frequently and always have bags of clothes packed, in case Iggy should spontaneously think of a new way to make something explode in an especially firey or dangerous way.

They're heading out the door, Iggy holding the cardboard box full of explosives and Gazzy carrying the tool kit, when Angel points out the van that's on the horizon, speeding down a winding rugged road like a guided missile. Jeb's mouth tightens into a thin white line.

"Okay. We're heading for tree cover. Now." The four of them hustle into the forest, and, surprisingly enough considering the way that things have been going, they get to the cabin without anybody falling and breaking an ankle.

Once they're inside the cabin, Jeb's all business, wearing a gaunt expression better suited for a skeleton. "You guys are going to continue building bombs. Angel, you help them, but try to pick up the Erasers. I'm going to see if I can pick up the signal that they're transmitting." He sets his small messenger bag on the card table that's near the cabin's fireplace and takes out his iBook G4, opens the lid and begins to type furiously.

Iggy sets the box of explosives on the red-carpeted floor in the center of the cabin. "Gasman. Toolkit." Gazzy opens the toolkit, his fingers stumbling on the latch for a second as he remembers that death might be approaching their doorstep. Angel hugs herself tightly before coming over to crouch by the toolkit with the remainder of the Flock.

"Tell me if you need anything," she says, before closing her eyes and taking a few deep breaths in. She opens her wings a little to balance herself, and she's so still she could be mistaken for a very colorful statue of a cherub.

Gazzy and Iggy don't ask her for anything. Instead, they assemble bomb after bomb, and they fall into a comfortable rhythm as they work on the last bomb, Big Boy. A weighted silence fills the room. Iggy, for once, doesn't crack a grin once Big Boy is fully assembled. He just solemnly sets the timers so once the bomb is triggered, a minute will elapse before it explodes.

Just as he's finished with this, Jeb closes the lid of his laptop so quickly and harshly it startles Angel out of her stupor. "They're at the E-house." His tone is calm, but the deep furrow between his eyebrows belies this false peace. "Angel, do they know about the cabin?"

"They …" Angel focuses. "Yes. But they're looking through the E-house right now. We have … an hour?" She closes her eyes again, takes in a deep breath. "Yes, an hour," she says after a little while. And then her eyes fly open. "They have backup! A second van, coming down the same route as the first … no GPS … speeding … four of them there, four of them in the E-house. And there's a chopper, heading in from the west. Ten of them there."

Iggy swears vehemently and at length, before he realizes that Jeb's glaring at him. "Sorry," he says.

Gazzy holds himself back from whistling. That tirade was almost as impressive as the time that Max broke her pinky toe on a door, and it had a more significant amount of deviation. Then he remembers that oh yeah, there are Erasers coming to either kill them or take them to a place where they'll _wish _to be killed, and he sobers. "We can bomb the van, if we hurry."

Jeb nods, points to the door. "Don't fly, the chopper will see you. Angel, I need you to stay here and give me updates. Where is the third group?"

As Gazzy and Iggy leave, slipping into the forest with their deadly box of explosives, Angel rubs her temples and focuses. She looks like she's getting a headache, Gazzy thinks. He hopes that using her psychic powers like this doesn't hurt. "You think she'll be okay?" he asks Iggy.

"Max?" Iggy responds. "Yeah, she'll be fine. 'S long as she keeps an eye on Nudge." The older boy is cradling the ammunition-fulled cardboard box as he slips through foliage, crouching to make himself inconspicuous. Luckily, he and Gazzy changed into their all-black ensembles when the others left—no point in not being prepared, as Iggy put it.

"No, Angel," Gazzy clarifies. "She looked like she was getting a headache. You think that she's going to run out of juice?" One of his long-running topics of speculation with Iggy involved exactly _how _Angel's mind worked. Iggy thought that the girl was able to read minds because she wasn't working her brain hard enough—sort of like Matilda from the Roald Dahl book, he said—whereas Gazzy was of the opinion that his little sister had some sort of excess brain power saved up, and, if she over-reached her psychic capabilities, that brain power would burn out. He hopes he won't have to find out today.

"Angel's going to be fine. Unless of course we all get eaten by Erasers. _Careful_," Iggy adds, as the Gasman steps on the back of his foot. They've reached the edge of the road that the Erasers will soon be driving down. "You bring the kit?" he asks.

"Of course I brought the kit." Gasman's a little offended that Iggy thinks so lightly of his abilities as an assistant arsonist. "What do you need?"

"Hmm." Iggy's sightless eyes gaze off into the distance as he crouches at the roadside. "Where are they?"

Gazzy scans the horizon. "I can't see them yet … fifty to a hundred miles, give or take," he reports when he does spot the black Hummer.

"Okay, we're going to have to move fast. What I want you to do is to put the mines in the road—dig it up a little, if you have to, it's pretty much all dirt over here anyway—and then report back when you're done."

Gazzy does as the older boy asks. "Okay," he says when the mines are installed and ready, "what now?"

"Now, how many grenades do we have?"

"Three."

"All right." Iggy's sightless eyes gaze out into the distance as if he senses something beyond the trees. "Put a stick in the ground on either side of the road. Put the string we have in the kit around the two sticks. Leave some extra string on each stick and tie the ring of a grenade to each stick."

"A trip wire!" Gazzy's eyes grow wide with the kind of joy usually seen only on Christmastime. (And yes, several Batchelder Christmastimes have had explosives. Actually, only several _haven't_.) "Sweet!" He sets the trap accordingly, making sure that one end is precariously close to a rather rocky hill.

His mouth narrows into a hard line as he shoves the sticks into the ground. _This one's for you, Ari. You always liked the rockslides. _He makes sure that the pins will be yanked out of the grenades when the car breaks the wire by carefully pulling them out slightly and holding his breath, trying not to get blown to bits.

"And now we wait. Oh, and moving to a safer spot would probably help us not get blown to bits or cut to pieces by shrapnel." Iggy stands and heads further into the woods, scaling a decent-sized tree but remaining under the cover of its foliage, lest the chopper see him. Gazzy follows.

"This is gonna be _good_," he's saying to Iggy, as he climbs up the tree, when he gets hit between the eyes with an invisible bolt of lightning. His arms and legs freeze where they are, and he can't breathe.

_Gazzy! They're coming! Cabin! _Angel's voice screams in his head.

"Iggy!" He drops down ten feet and nearly scrapes his face raw on the tree bark, landing on his feet. "Angel's in trouble; they're at the cabin!" He sprints back to the cabin blindly, not caring that he sounds like a herd of elephants. Iggy jumps down to the ground and follows. They reach the cabin in seconds, and Gazzy yanks the door open. No Erasers. Just Angel and Jeb. Still high on adrenalin, the eight-year-old slams the door shut behind him and runs to his sister.

"Are you okay? Angel?" She's sitting cross-legged, her backpack on her back, and massaging her temples. "Angel?" Jeb hands him his bag and he accepts it, his eyes not leaving her face. "Short stuff?"

When she hears her nickname, Angel's eyes fly open. "I told you to _leave_. They're coming here in—"

_Thud! _The unmistakable sound of a two-hundred-plus-pound Eraser slamming himself into the door cuts off Angel, and dead silence falls over the cabin.

"Little pigs, little pigs, let us _i-in_," croons the sickly-sweet falsetto voice of one of the eight Erasers surrounding the house. Iggy's about to reply with something witty and no doubt obscene, but when a _huge _series of explosions rips through the air, all four of them drop to the ground. Gazzy protectively covers Angel with his arms and backpack. Iggy grins, but his smile fades when he sees the Erasers are still at the windows.

"Jeb," he says, his voice ringing quietly in the aftermath of the explosions, "are these windows bulletproof?"

Jeb shakes his head and stands, dropping into a defensive stance. "Iggy, I want you to keep an eye on Gasman and Angel. Take one of the pipe bombs and—"

"_What?_" Angel reads Jeb's mind at the same time that Iggy figures out his intentions. The older boy continues her question.

"We can't just leave you here!"

"You can and you _will_." Jeb's voice is the embodiment of steel. "Take the grenade and throw it through the roof. Get out of here as quickly as possible." He's about to say more, but one of the Erasers has had the bright idea to break the window. Crashing glass and ripping wood resonate throughout the space, accented with the feral growls of the enemy. "Nevermind," he says, as if correcting himself. "Go to Cali, meet back up, _go!_"

Iggy remains stock-still. And then Gazzy watches as he takes their last grenade—their last explosive, period, because all of the pipe bombs are over in the corner and torturously out of reach—and tosses it up, underhand, so it hits the ceiling. The explosion is tame compared to what he just heard, and it seems to be muffled somehow. He can feel Jeb's hands on his shoulder, pulling him up. But why does it feel like he's moving through molasses?

Jeb tosses him into the air, and, on reflex, his wings snap open and he soars out of the cabin, Iggy and Angel on his heels, quickly making up the distance and flying out with him. Time speeds up. The only thing he feels in this moment is the slicing chill of the wind. The three of them streak away from the cabin, headed west. They've barely flown for a minute when they hear the second huge explosion. Big Boy, living up to its namesake. Gazzy risks a glance over his shoulder, and, sure enough, the cabin isn't there anymore.

"Guess it's final now," Iggy says, giving voice to the understatement of the century.

Unbidden, a snippet of a Bon Jovi song that Jeb sometimes played for Max pops up in his head.

_Who says you can't go home?_

The summer sun is warm on his back and wings, and there's a fresh breeze ruffling his hair as he soars away from the scent of burning and ashen wood. There are tears running down his face, but they drop into the quickly disappearing forest below.

* * *

My beta, **Black Rose Heart**, is utterly balling. Kudos to her.


	8. Chapter 8

Ari's had his share of harsh awakenings. When you grow up in a house with two pyromaniacs, a girl who can't shut her mouth for five minutes straight, and the punch-it-if-it-touches-me Max, you get used to waking up with a headache, bruises, or both. Iggy's already joked several times about how none of them will ever have to worry about hangovers—they've already gone through so much worse.

So comparatively, waking up by being prodded harshly in the ribs isn't so bad. Until he remembers that he's been kidnapped away from his only home and brought to a place where he'll probably die unless the Flock is able to rescue him.

"Hey. Hey, loser." The rough words intrude into Ari's mind and kick the spots of his brain still trying to sleep with steel-tipped syllables. "Wake up, you ugly pig-meat!"

_Pig-meat? _Ari opens his eyes warily. Glaring down at him is a stocky boy who's about his age, maybe a little older. He's more muscular than any kid in the flock, and his face is set into a defined scowl.

Oh, and his eyes are yellow and slanted in a way that no human's eyes should be. Ari stands, and the boy immediately throws him down to the floor, grabbing Ari's right shoulder and _shoving_ him to the ground. It shocks the seven year old to full alertness immediately. Ari gets his legs underneath him and launches a weak counter-attack, punching the boy in the face and shoving himself forward.

_Never look weak_, Jeb taught him and Angel. _Your opponent is going to try to intimidate you with their size. Don't let them think it's working. _

Ari hits the other boy in the face a few times, his punches as quick and painful as he can make them, before his opponent reacts, slamming his knee up into Ari's stomach. The air rapidly leaves his lungs, and Ari wheezes and takes a quick breath before pulling himself together.

Then they're fighting for real, fists flying and bruises forming, until the door opens and the boy freezes, his hands wrapped tightly around Ari's neck while Ari kicks at him and tries to shove his thumbs into the boy's yellow eyes. It isn't working, and he can see spots. Whoever came in is invisible from where he's standing.

"What the hell are you doing? And where do you get off on beating up the new kid?" The hands around his neck are released, and Ari sinks to his knees, gasping for air, relieved and bewildered. He has the good sense to cover his face with his hands, but he doubts that would stop the yellow-eyed boy if he were to decide to attack again.

"Jeez, Robert," the voice continues, "you get kicked out of Phys Ed for fighting so you come back to the dorm to … fight some more? Wow, they sure didn't kill off any of _your _brain cells."

"Shut up, Amelia," the boy rasps. Ari takes this moment of being ignored to rub his sore and stinging neck—he thinks blood's been drawn—and try to stay invisible. He contemplates running for the door, but he heard it _click _shut when this new girl walked in. Amelia was her name, or something like that. He isn't stupid enough to try to get past Robert. "Nobody asked for your bitchin' opinion."

Ari hears the thud of a body hitting the ground and looks up. Robert's sprawled out on the floor to his left, and there's a girl on top of him, punching with a vengeance that exhibits itself through a cold, ruthless beating. She punches him in the stomach and ribs several times, half-crouches over him, and then slams his head onto the ground, shoving her hand into his forehead so the back of his head hits the floor with a definitive _thud_. Robert immediately stops trying to get up and slumps, doing an nice job of imitating a sack of potatoes.

"_Never _call me Amelia, you jerk," she spits at the unconscious form. Then she sits back on her heels and looks at Ari. Ari freezes, though not from fear.

Jeb keeps photographs of the Flock down in his study, along with a picture of Ari. The pictures are encased in frames made out of glittery Popsicle sticks—an eight-year-old Nudge's birthday present to Ari's father. Once, when he was in a rare conversational mood, Jeb told Ari that the photograph of Max was taken when the Flock first left the School. In it, the young girl is crouching at the banks of a river, staring at the camera. Although she's dressed in clean clothing and her hair is pulled back, there's something feral in her eyes, something that speaks of fights, of blood and sweat and panic. As she stares at the camera, the furrow between her eyebrows belies her confusion, but Ari's not quite sure if she's going to run away from the strange device, attack it, or if she knows that it's just a curious, but harmless, device.

He's staring at the girl from that photograph. They're identical, down to the splash of freckles across the nose and the slight head tilt. And when the girl speaks, her voice is almost a twin of Max's. The phrasing is definitely the same.

"Hi. I'm Amy. _Not Amelia_."

For a second, Ari forgets that he's in a hellish laboratory run by people who would cut him up into slivers as soon as look at him. This girl has the same reassuring attitude as Max, no matter how she masks it. He can tell that she isn't going to kill him, even if she does seem a little crazy.

"I, um, I kind of guessed that," Ari finally says, and points at Robert. "You showed me that pretty well. Thanks. I'm Ari."

The girl grins. "He's a jerk anyway. Nice to meet 'cha, Ari Batchelder. Why are you here?"

"There were …" Ari remembers the way Angel's blue eyes were wide with terror, the way Max was crumpled on the ground. "They …" The suffocating feeling of duct tape over his mouth, the gunshots that ripped through the air like knives, but four times as deadly. "Erasers," he concludes.

"Yeah, that sucks." Amy stands up and wipess her hands off on her jeans. Ari looks at her.

She looks like Max. Exactly like Max. Well, the photographs of Max as a kid look exactly like her. The same quirky half-smile, the same brown eyes and the same way of holding herself. It's really sort of creepy, in a cool way. She's wearing a blue t-shirt with the word "Itex" written on it in white capital letters—a twin to one of the shirts in Gazzy's closet—and worn blue jeans with green sneakers peeking out from the bottom. The slits in the back of the shirt allow her eagle-like wings to rest against her back.

She has the same wavy, golden-streaked brown hair, held back from her face in a braid that's secured with a rubber band, and it sits on her shoulder. She fiddles with the ends of the braids as she looks at him, before finally offering him a hand up. He takes it.

"You okay?" she asks, and squints at him. "You look a little out of it."

Ari's about to say, "Yeah, I'm fine," just as the door opens. A group of about twelve kids enters the room. Although most of them resemble Robert, who's currently groaning on the floor, there are five that look a little … different.

Ari does a double-take. _They're the Flock!_ he realizes. _They're like a mini-Flock! _The first one he notices is the mini-Fang, who doesn't look as nasty or have the long hair. And he's actually wearing a color that _isn't _something Dracula would use to decorate his house with—his shirt is a bright shade of red.

"Crud, Amy, did you knock him out again?" one of the girls complains. She's a few inches taller than Ari, and built like Max—all muscle. Her eyes are the same freakish shade of yellow. "He's going to be an asshole when he wakes up and you know it."

Ari stares at her. _Why is she cursing? Why is she allowed to curse? _This is the kind of language that Max uses when she's woken up late and she's starving, not the kind that he and Gazzy throw around in casual conversation. And why does she look like she spends all of her free time doing push-ups?

Come to think of it, all of the kids that aren't in the mini-Flock (six boys, not counting Robert, seven girls) are all freakishly muscular, with yellow eyes and harsh faces. Ari suddenly feels very, very small. He's very aware of how _easy _human flesh is to shred, especially when you aren't strong and fast like Max, or anybody that's been genetically enhanced by mad scientists.

"That's Lila," Amy says in an undertone to Ari, not taking her eyes off of the other girl, "She-Who-Will-Never-Stop-Whining." Raising her voice, she responds to the other girl, "He was beating up New Kid Ari over here."

Lila scrutinizes Ari. "Well, New Kid Ari over there should have stuck up for himself. Oh, wait." She walks over and sniffs him. As Ari's about to ask her _what the heck are you doing_, she laughs and yells, "New Kid Ari's _human_!"

All of the yellow-eyed kids crack up. They're around the room, some of them sitting on beds talking and others playing catch with a tennis ball. But all of them hear this statement and glance at Ari with renewed interest.

"Hey, quit being a loser," Amy tells Lila. "Or I'll beat you up."

Lila glares at Amy and rolls her eyes. "Whatever you say, ugly." But she goes away after that, and the other five kids that compose the mini-Flock come over.

"Who're you?" asks mini-Iggy. Or mini-Gazzy. Ari isn't quite sure. "I'm James, this is Wendy," he indicates a girl that looks like Angel's twin sister.

"Jane," a six-year-old Nudge waves at him and grins, "Peter," mini-Gazzy, or mini-Iggy, "and," he pointed to the mini-Fang, "the Grim Reaper of Doom and Suffering."

"I am not the Grim Reaper," mini-Fang says calmly. "Hey, Ari. I'm Alex." He extends a hand and Ari isn't sure if it's for a high-five or handshake. Ari ends up shrugging and fist-bumping Alex.

"So how did you get here?" Amy asks again. "You didn't say."

Ari takes a deep breath in. "Erasers," he says, "they kidnapped me. And they tied me up, and they brought me here, and … how come we aren't in cages?"

"Cages?" Amy looks at him like he's crazy. "What would we be in cages for? Cages are for the poor babies that don't make it, or for the crazy ones." At the mention of the "poor babies," Jane and Wendy look at the ground with sudden interest. "We stay in the dorms because we're important. There are some others that stay near the labs, if they're training or testing, but _cages_?"

Ari, curious and confused, forgets to keep his mouth shut and blurts out, "And how come you guys look just like the Flock?"

Jane laughs. "Your friend is stupid," she says to Amy, before addressing Ari. "We look like them because we _are _them. Except better."

"A lot better," James adds. "Like, I'm not blind and Peter doesn't have something messed up in his guts."

"Guys, I think you're freaking Ari out," Alex says. He's been sitting on the bed since he introduced himself to Ari. "How about I explain, kay?" When nobody—even Amy—bothers to cut him off, he continues. "We're the Flock's back up. In case they screw up, or die, or go crazy—don't laugh, it's happened—we step in and we help out."

_Help what? _Ari chooses instead to vocalize the more pressing issue. "You're all _kids_."

"Shut up," Amy tells him. "I'm not a kid. I turn seven in October, you jerk. How old are _you_?"

Ari smirks at her. "My birthday is in April. I'm going to be eight," he says and he realizes, "I'm older than you!" This is _great_! He can boss them around! The only other person that he's older than is Angel, and she doesn't listen to him, so this is just _awesome_!

Amy glares at him. "Shut up, Ari Batchelder, I can beat you up."

"But you're just a _kid_," Ari says, and grins. When Amy glares at him, Alex smirks, and his face is _priceless_.

It isn't so funny when Amy lands a neat left hook across Ari's jaw and knocks him into the central area of the room with the force of the blow. Peter pulls Wendy out of the way, and they sit on the bed next to Alex and watch Ari getting beaten up.

He stands up and manages to get a couple of decent punches in, blacking her right eye and making her gasp for breath when he hits her in the stomach, but she's tougher than he is. Faster, too. She snaps a quick kick into his side, leaning with the momentum, and slams her left wing into his chest. He tries to shove it back in, like he's seen Nudge do to Iggy once, but his fingers slide on the feathers. So he just _shoves _her, and she lands on her butt. Hard. And then she smiles. It's a weird, twisted smile, and it scares him for a moment.

She stands back up, feints another punch to his left, and then drives her right fist across his face, before trying to sweep his legs out from under him with a quick sideways kick. It's a little tougher for her than it would normally be, because he's keeping a strong stance, but she does topple him, and he lands on his right side, bruising his ribs further. "Had enough?" she asks him. She's still smiling, like fighting is Christmas morning for her.

"Yeah."

She crouches and sticks out her hand. He takes it, and she pulls him up so fast that Ari has to check to make sure his shoulder is still in place. "Okay, Ari, we're friends now, and if you make one more joke about my age, I'll freaking kill you, okay?"

"Okay." He realizes something. "Hey, I'm taller than you!"

She elbows his ribs. "That qualifies as joking about my age, dorkface." She's about to say more, when a bell rings. "That's dinner," she explains, and Ari realizes that he's _really_ hungry.

"What time is it?" he asks her.

"Six-thirty two," James calls out.

Amy rolls her eyes. "Show-off." When she sees that Ari's confused, she explains, "he can do this thing where he always knows what time it is. Jane can too, but I don't care because I'm hungry and come on." She heads for the door, which Alex is holding open.

Ari follows her. He's confused, bruised, and scared. But at least he has one friend, even if she is a total nutso.

"Can you tell me more about this place?" he asks the aforementioned nutso.

"Sure, once we get food." As she runs down the white-tiled hallway to catch up with the rest of the kids (both the mini-Flock and the yellow-eyes), her braid bounces around her shoulders. He follows.

* * *

I wasn't dead, I swear. I was just absolutely bogged down with school and studying for midterms and life in general so I didn't update for ... has it been a month now? Sorry 'bout that. Gods, this must be how the Doctor feels when he stumbles in on people when it's 40 years later for them but only 5 minutes have passed for him ...

**_Anyway. _Black Rose Heart **is a fantastic beta reader and a great person in general and she should be given a medal for putting up with my horrible writing and another medal for making it better.


	9. Chapter 9

We managed to stay in the air until we were somewhere in Arizona, which was freaking _spectacular_. Granted, we didn't have much food left, having consumed all of it while flying, and Nudge was starting to look at me with wounded-puppy eyes (the precursor to her infamous Bambi eyes) … but we were in Arizona. We were that much closer to reaching Ari, to getting him back, and to kicking the asses of the people who took him away from us. Maybe we wouldn't even need a Plan B.

"Ma-ax?" Nudge's ever-so-carefully-pitched voice reached me from where she was flying, a good ten feet below me and about five feet behind.

I glanced down. "Yeah, Nudgester?"

"Can we take a break? I can't feel my wings." She had been flying progressively lower and lower over the course of the afternoon, starting at around four. It was six now.

I glanced down. We were flying over a forest, dense foliage a couple of miles in every direction. If we were going to stop, it would be best to do it in a place where we could sleep undisturbed. I would put money on the fact that not that many people in a nearby hick town would come out here.

Besides, we _had _been flying for something like eight hours … I yawned, conscious of my wings cramping up. They had seemingly lost their nerve endings a while ago, but no way was I going to admit that in front of Steel Mutant Bird Kid Fang. Right now, a nice nap would be the best thing since sliced bread. A bit of food would be nice, too (whoever thought that "eats like a bird" meant "barely eats" was a fudging idiot and deserves a combat boot to the stomach), but I would go for what I could get. I made an executive decision.

"Fang? We're going down."

Of course, as soon as I said this, the flip side of the argument came to nag at me.

If we kept going, we could land in the town not ten miles from here that my raptor vision was all too quick to detect in the clear air. If we kept going, we could land in some place with _food_, instead of a freakin' forest. I didn't want to think about eating moss and rocks for dinner. What else did forests have anyway?

_Snakes_, my subconscious told me. _They have lots of lovely, tasty snakes_. I shuddered.

_Shut up, head. _

But, of course, my mind didn't listen. Typical. I continued to ruminate on the possibility of flying on. If we kept going, even if it was only for a few more hours, imagine how much _further _we would go … it would be easier to keep going, too, we always flew better at night … Fang's wing slapped mine, and I glanced to my side abruptly. He was hovering, his face as unfathomable as always.

"It's better if we stop now," he said, and gave me one of those stupid, unreadable little half-smiles of his. "It'll be easier to get up in the air tomorrow. Besides," he paused for a moment, like he was swallowing his ego, "I was going to ask for a break anyway."

It took all my willpower to not ask for him to repeat that. The indefatigable Fang, _tired enough to ask to stop_? Oh, if I had a tape recorder …

Swallowing _my _snarky reply, I nodded and tried to sound like I knew what I was talking about from the start. "Okay." It didn't work, of course. Fang knew me almost as well as I knew me, and I could tell that from the way he raised an eyebrow at me that he didn't buy it for a second.

Nevertheless, he swooped down to follow Nudge, his wide wingspan and all-black ensemble making him look like a raven—that is, if ravens wore dirty Keds. I stared after him for a moment. _What's his deal now?_

I shrugged and started to head downward, following Nudge and Fang. We landed on the forest floor after some careful maneuvering, and Nudge promptly curled up at the base of a tree and fell asleep without bothering to take her bag off.

I walked over and fiddled with the straps so I could pull it off of her without shaking her too much—she was out like a light. The bag was much lighter than it was this morning, probably because she had eaten the food that accounted for about half of its weight. I zipped it shut and slipped it under her head to serve as a makeshift pillow before sitting down next to her, slipping my own bag off.

Letting my wings unfurl a little, I sighed. They were so sore I could barely feel the rough bark of the tree pressing up against my feathers. I tilted my head back to look up at the darkening sky and let out a breath. Through the leaves and branches, it looked so far away, but I could spend hours—days, even—in its endless span.

"Kind of scary, isn't it?" I asked Fang, who had come to sit in front of me.

He raised an eyebrow.

"Most people think flying is this … impossible thing, like it's totally freaking impossible. But we … we get to do it. We're really, really lucky." _Okay, Max, the sleep deprivation is getting to ya._

"On the other hand, we're mutant freaks who will never live a normal life." He gave me a little half-smile as he delivered this line.

I rolled my eyes. "Don't be such a _downer_. And get some sleep. I don't think it would be a good idea to do watches, we're going to need to be in the air first thing."

Fang nodded and pulled off his pack, curled into the fetal position, and shut his eyes. In a few moments, his deepened breathing let me know that he had joined Nudge in the land of Nod.

I kept staring at the sky, disregarding what I told Fang. Somebody _always _needed to keep watch. Besides, we were near a small town. When those two woke up, I could always get a cup of coffee when we went out for a food run—because we _would _need to restock. I let my head fall back against the bark of the tree's trunk as I watched the stars.

_Maybe a little shut-eye won't hurt_, I thought. _Just a few minutes …_

When I opened my eyes, it was because the sunlight was baring holes through my eyelids into my mind. I blinked blearily several times as I tried to focus on the green-and-brown blur around me. As the forest came into crystal-clear focus, I frowned. Everything seemed so much … brighter.

_Oh, no. _What time was it? How long had we been asleep? I squinted up at the sky, my neck stiff. Judging from the position of the sun in the sky, it was about ten in the morning.

_No, no, no. _How freaking stupid was I? This was a _rescue_ mission! Who knew what those freaks were doing to Ari while we were sleeping like idiots! I stumbled into a crouching position and shook Nudge urgently.

"Nudge," I hissed. "Come on, wake up." She barely moved.

"Nudge, come _on_!"

As I shook her again, I was suddenly transported back to the School. Memories of the harsh fluorescent light bouncing off of white-tiled walls and floors filled my mind, along with the screaming of the occasional unsuccessful mutant and the harsh growls of the Erasers as they went about their daily business of terrifying anything smaller than them.

For a few seconds, I wasn't crouching on the forest floor in my jeans and combat boots—I was small, six or seven, in cheap polyester pajamas, kneeling on the tiled floor and shaking a six-year-old Iggy as he panted, exhausted from running on a treadmill at top speed for hours.

I took a breath in, trying to fight it. _You know it's not real, Maximum, _Jeb always told me whenever I had panic attacks like this. _You know where you are. _But Jeb wasn't here; he couldn't grab my shoulders and shake me out of it.

Fractured images flashed past my eyes—Fang, with blood smeared across his face. Erasers circling a dog cage in the Kill Pit, the place where they put the unsuccessful experiments. Iggy, Fang and myself, holding hands in a wind tunnel as we tried to fight the air pressure that was forcing us back. Bright lights and white tiles with drops of fresh red blood on them—was it my blood? _Angel's blood?_

I stumbled back away from Nudge and fell on my butt _hard_, sliding several feet on the forest floor.

"_Nudge_!" Oh, my god, was she _dead_? Did she expire in her sleep? My heart was pounding and my chest felt tight. Why was it so hard to breathe? "_Nudge!_"

She pushed herself up on one elbow, blinking sleepily. "Whatizzit?"

Not dead. Not expired. I blinked several times, my vision slightly blurred with what definitely could not be tears.

"We … we have to go," I managed to get out, and then pulled myself back together. "Nudge, come on! We have to get in the air!"

"Max. Calm. Down." I whipped my head 180 degrees, nearly cracking my already sore neck, and glared at Fang. "We wasted _hours_, Fang! We have to _go_!"

"We have to get food, first. There's a town nearby. We can stock up from some Dumpster or something, get our bearings, and then get back in the air by noon." Fang reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. _You're freaking out_, he mouthed.

I cut my eyes to Nudge. _Not in front of the kids_, I meant.

"Sulugerhad?" He said one word, in the secret language that Jeb taught us. It was a word that we never taught the younger ones, simply because they wouldn't understand it. It meant a variety of things—panic, terror, and hallucinations—but in the end, it boiled down to one thing: the School and the horrible way it stuck in our minds.

I nodded. "You think Ari …"

"We won't be able to help him unless we're at full power," Fang said, before lapsing back into silence.

I turned to Nudge. "Come on, kiddo. Let's go get some breakfast."

Nudge blinked, and I _swear _her eyes tripled in size. "_Food_!" she said, in the tone of voice generally reserved for teen girls in romantic movies talking about their boyfriends.

I picked my backpack up and slung it on. "Come on, then, you." Fang was already standing a few paces away, backpack on and ready to go. I brushed a few errant specks of dirt off of my jeans.

As we headed out of the forest, I noticed a small group of kids approaching. They were mostly boys—big, burly ones, the kind that would work well on a football team.

The one in the middle, though? Was a girl. A girl about Nudge's age—but unlike Nudge, she was human. She was walking with her head high and her shoulders square, but I could see the fear in her eyes. That fear was the same look in Angel's eyes when she saw the Erasers approaching the E-shaped house.

I narrowed my eyes, stopped walking and listened.

"What the fuck is wrong with you, Martinez?" asked the biggest one.

"Yeah, what the hell made you say shit like that, you dumb little bitch?" A slightly uglier, but not as big, boy followed up this rather pathetic interrogation.

"Last time I heard, it wasn't a crime to tell the truth," the girl responded. "And that's what I was doing—it definitely wasn't what _you_ were doing."

"Hey, you dumb fuck, do you wanna end up like your _precious_ little Ortiz?" This one was blond, and holding a shotgun loosely in the crook of his arm. How the heck did he get that? He couldn't have been older than seventeen. Sometimes the whole Second Amendment thing really sucked.

The girl looked at him. "Why don't you stop talking about Ortiz? I mean, you can't be satisfied with making him look like a truck hit him? You have to talk nasty about him behind his back, too?" Her tone hardened as she snapped at the boy, who probably weighed twice as much as she did. "What did you have against him, huh? Were you _scared_?"

"You dumb little …" He moved as if to punch her, and, quick as a rabbit, she ducked under his arm.

I whipped my head to my left. "Fang! Nudge!" They were a little further ahead, but they stopped. "She's in trouble," I said, pointing at the girl, who was currently trying to outmaneuver three guys, one of which had a gun. "I'm going to help her."

Fang looked at me like I was crazy, but said nothing. Maybe I was crazy, but if I was going to let some defenseless kid get beat up a couple of yards away from me, then I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

"I'm coming with," Nudge said.

_That's my girl. _"Fang?"

He sighed, like a parent dragged onto a Tilt-A-Whirl by a five-year-old for the seventeenth time. "Fine. We beat up the jerks and then …" I didn't hear the rest of what he said, because I was already charging off to beat up some jerks, Nudge hot on my heels.

Whoops. I do tend to charge in without thinking.

We ran straight into the fight, Nudge using the momentum from her dash to spin out a neat low kick, knocking Ugly-But-Not-Big to the ground, where he scrambled around for a second before coming up on his knees. I turned to Big Guy.

"Three on one," I said, and my eyes narrowed. "That seems about fair." I kneed him in the stomach, hard.

He was faster than I expected—he got a pretty decent hit into the side of my face as my knee thudded into his gut. A strong punch, but sloppy. I jumped wildly, flailing my arms, before centering my body and launching another, stronger kick into his chest. Whenever I had kicked Fang like that, he stumbled back a few steps. Sometimes not even that.

This guy? He was flat on his back on the dusty ground, out for the count. I glanced over at Nudge, who was wiping a smear of blood off the girl's face with the sleeve of her hoodie. Fang was pulling off Ugly-But-Not-Big's shoes, and Shotgun was down for the count, sprawled almost comically.

"What did you do to him?" I raised an eyebrow at Shotgun.

Fang snorted. "Barely touched him. We can go now."

"No, we should get Ella home first," Nudge said. "Jason has friends."

Fang and I sighed simultaneously, but before he could say anything, I turned to him. "We started it, we're going to finish it."

"_Fine_." He brushed his hair back out of his eyes with a swift, irritated gesture no doubt meant to convey his contempt for the world, me, and all things related to doing the right thing.

"Okay, come on … Ella? Come on, Ella. We're gonna get you home," I said, adopting the same tone I would use for talking to Nudge whenever she went on one of her rare panic attacks. "Just take us to where you live, okay?"

Ella nodded, her dark brown eyes wide. "I live … um … left," she said, half to herself, before turning and quickly walking in the direction of the forest. Nudge kept stride with her, but Fang and I had to half-jog for a few steps before we could catch up.

I smiled to myself as we walked. It was a nice day so far—bright blue sky, birds flying around, fresh air, the sound of a hammer being clicked … _wait, what?_

I shoved Nudge. "Shotgun's up! Run, run, run!" The four of us took off like bats out of hell, Nudge half-dragging Ella. I looped my arm through Nudge's and sped up. Oh, if only I could whip out my wings! I'd have us out of here in seconds!

_No, Maximum_, Jeb's voice chided me. _Remember the first rule._

The first rule is very simple: _You stay out of sight if at all possible. Keep your wings and yourself hidden so you can stay alive. _

I huffed out a breath as I ran, whipping my head over my shoulder. Shotgun was aiming carefully, trying to focus on Ella's head.

_Damn it! Stupid, stupid, stupid! Why didn't you make sure he wasn't faking it, you idiot? _My mind was too busy yelling at me to keep track of my feet, so I stumbled, lightly bumping Nudge. Of course, since the worst could happen, it did.

Nudge, who wasn't the most well-coordinated at the best of times, tripped and almost fell, righting herself only by waving her arms wildly. Unfortunately, Ella who was holding Nudge's left arm, was caught off balance. Not having our hair-trigger reflexes, she hit the ground hard, the air leaving her lungs with an ungraceful _whoosh_.

She bounced a little before thudding to the ground. When she lifted her head off of the gravel of the road to look at us, I could see blood starting to well up from a nasty case of road rash that was covering the entire left side of her face. The panic in her eyes made her look like a rabbit in a trap, and I could see the reason for it. Shotgun, still very far behind her, was taking aim at a now perfectly still target.

I spun around and sprinted back to her, bending over her and trying to help pull her up without breaking anything. She gasped sharply, and I dropped to my knees to see if she had broken her arm. She hadn't, luckily.

"Max!" Fang yelled, and a screaming pain erupted in my shoulder and my world turned red. _Shotgun! Oh, my god oh my god_

_ohmy-_

For a second, my vision went black, but then Fang had his hand on my injured shoulder, his dark eyes furious.

"You're not dying here," he grit out, before pulling me up by the same shoulder that I had just been shot in. I nearly blacked out (again), but kept my grip on Ella's hand.

We kept running, and the adrenalin and terror blocked out the pain. Well, most of it.

Okay, some of it. Enough to keep me going, anyway. The four of us ended up stumbling up to the front door of a rather cute, if a bit small, house. There was a garden out in front, and a white picket fence. The house itself was painted a cheerful shade of light blue. It was almost annoying how I noticed all of this while bleeding out. Ella ran up to the door and started knocking on it, hard.

"Mom! Mom! There's a girl that's hurt, she needs your help!"

Fang, Nudge, and I, looked at each other, panicked. _Rule one, first rule, Ultimate Survival Tip is stay out of sight._

Maybe if we took off fast enough, we could get out of sight. Lake Mead was close by, we could camp out near there and wash my wing up. I moved my hand to grip my shoulder, and shifted my wing to begin to extend it. That's when a fresh wave of pain hit, radiating out from a golf-ball sized point near the top of my right wing.

_That idiot hit my wing! _I shook my head at Fang and Nudge frantically. Fang snapped his wings back in underneath his backpack and tilted his head a fraction of an angle.

"I'm. He." Forming sentences with a hole in two of my most important appendages was kind of hard, who would have thought? "I can't."

Nudge made a small noise of surprise as she realized what I meant. "Is it …"

The sound of a door opening cut her off, and the three of us whipped our heads to the left, like deer hearing an oncoming car. A young woman stood at the door. She looked like Ella, only about twenty years older, and was wiping her hands off on her jeans. She looked past Ella and saw the three of us, and her eyes widened as she saw me, pressing onto my shoulder to try to stop the bleeding.

"Oh, my god! Come in!"

I exchanged another set of terrified looks with Fang and Nudge. Stay or go? Stay?

* * *

It appears that every time I try to update more I go on some super-hiatus. I'm not dead, I swear. The rest of this fic is planned out, and I'm contemplating sequels, I just need to find the time to _write _them.

Anyhoo. Much thanks to **Black Rose Heart **for beta-reading this fic.


	10. Chapter 10

"… And that's how I ended up burning off Alex's eyebrows," Amy concluded around a mouth full of cheesy spaghetti.

Ari snickered. "You're _kidding_, right? I don't think it's possible to microwave something with the door off."

"No, no, it's possible," James said enthusiastically, eyes lighting up like two blue neon signs. "Jane figured out how to do it. You gotta pop off the number thing and connect two wire things," he gestured as if an invisible microwave was hovering in the air above the table, "and then _bam_! No eyebrows."

"Can we talk about something else?" Alex asked, sounding slightly irritated with the old story. "How about the time that Amy …"

The aforementioned bird girl whacked him on the head with her right wing. "We don't _talk _about that time, Alex." Her face was the color of a squashed cherry, causing Ari to raise his eyebrows.

"Why? What happened?"

"Well," began Peter, "Amy …" James slapped a hand over the other boy's mouth, effectively silencing him.

The seven of them were sitting at a table toward the back of the School's cafeteria, away from the creepy yellow-eyed kids. The cafeteria itself didn't look very different from a regular school cafeteria. It had a window where you asked for food from a chef who looked like a retired MMA fighter, decent tables, and even some kids chatting away in groups. Regular school, that is, if the people attending were hybrids and whitecoats.

Several scientists sat at nearby tables, sipping coffee and annotating documents. One such scientist had a table all to himself, with papers spread out all over it. A stack of papers sat beside him.

Ari tried to crane his neck so he could snatch a little more information from the documents, but Amy tapped his hand lightly. A warning, which Ari didn't catch.

"What are you looking at, Ari Batchelder?" she asked. The rest of the mini-Flock had fallen silent.

"That guy over there's got a lot of papers," Ari said, pointing with his chin as he leaned backward. "I'm trying to see what they are."

"Don't," Wendy told him, and she sounded _exactly _like Angel, warning him not to stand on counters in his lucky socks because then he would fall and break his neck. "You'll just get in trouble and you might even get put in a cage for sticking your nose in where it doesn't belong."

This alone made Ari sit up straight and attempt to appear inconspicuous by making conversation with a now-somber Amy. "So that scientist, who is he? His hair looks like he fell asleep on his desk!"

Amy laughed, but it sounded a bit forced. As she spoke, her face returned to its mischievous state. "That's Dr. Reilly. He's really cool. He's got a girlfriend who rides a motorcycle and she has real tattoos."

"You're lying," Alex said indifferently. The qulity of his voice made it clear that this was a highly-contested subject that he didn't expect to resolve. "She hasn't got any tattoos."

"No, she isn't lying," Jane told him defiantly. "I saw them too. It's a blue dolphin on her left shoulder and a cheetah print on her back."

Amy made a face at Alex. "Don't call me a liar, Grim Reaper." She turned back to face Ari. "_Anyway_," she said. "He's got a girlfriend who is really cool and he also lets you drink coffee if you give him the money to buy it for you."

"So what? Jeb lets me drink coffee every day," Ari bragged. That was … a slight exaggeration of the truth. Jeb let him drink coffee _once _… well, the one time that Ari drank coffee he didn't say anything … because Ari told him it was Max's attempt at making hot chocolate.

_Well, Amy has wings and she can kick my butt_, Ari reasoned, _so I need to stick to my guns._

As if she was fitted with a lie-detector, Amy chose to take this moment to call him on his bluff. "Oh yeah? And how do you drink your coffee, Ari Batchelder?"

"With cinnamon," Ari told her defiantly, picking the first condiment he could think of that.

"Oh yeah?" Amy repeated, jutting out her chin a little.

"Oh yeah." Ari put both of his hands on the table and stared at her with the same intensity she was using to stare at him. He felt like he was in a gangster movie, the kind that Gazzy would wake him up at three in the morning to watch.

"Fine then." Amy stopped staring at him to nudge Alex's shoulder. "Alex, lend me fifty cents? Please?"

"I think I have a quarter," said Alex, and put his foot up on the bench so he could wriggle out of his sneaker. He shoved his hand into his sock and pulled out the small metal coin. "Yeah, I have a quarter. That's it."

"I might have twenty five cents," Jane added as she shoved her hand deep into her right jeans pocket. After rooting around for a bit, she triumphantly produced five nickels.

"Here you are, Amy! You can pay me back with a piggy back ride."

Amy wrapped a napkin around her hand and picked up Alex's coin, wrinkling her nose as she did so. With her left hand, she reached across the table and took Jane's nickels before standing up and walking over to Dr. Reilly.

Ari watched her, apprehension building in his stomach. He looked at the other members of the mini-Flock, who seemed oblivious to his predicament. Alex and Wendy were chatting quietly. James, Jane, and Peter were hunched over a napkin. If they were anything like the kids they were cloned from, they were probably plotting ways to make something explode.

As he looked back to Amy and Dr. Reilly, Ari's stomach twisted with anxiety. Was Amy going to tell Reilly that he was human and not worth their time? That he wasn't supposed to be here, in the cafeteria? Were they going to just throw him to the roadside and let him try to find his way home because he wasn't the one that they wanted? But then what would she need the money for?

… _Oh. _Ari blanched. She was going to buy him coffee and make him drink it. Oh, crud. He didn't even _like _coffee! Ari hunched over his plate of oily, sauce-covered spaghetti and twirled some pasta around his fork. Suddenly, his dinner wasn't so appetizing.

And then he remembered that no matter how funny the mini-Flock was, or how good Amy's stories were, he was still stuck hundreds of miles away from Max and Gazzy and he was surrounded by scientists who were probably going to stick him in a wind tunnel to try to get him to run at fifteen miles per hour or dissect his brain, and he _really _didn't think that his dinner was that appetizing.

Ari slouched over his plate and prodded at his spaghetti lightly. The noodles in their red sauce looked like the picture of a brain that Jeb had shown them on the computer. Just as he was about to shove his plate away, put his head on the table and try to make himself as small as possible, somebody tapped his shoulder. He twisted around, warily.

It was just Amy, and she was holding a white cup. "Try this," she said. Ari blinked at her and considered just giving up and telling her that he had lied. The more he thought about where he was, the sicker he felt. Right now all he wanted to do was sleep, cry, and try to get out of this place.

He didn't do any of that. Instead, he took the cup from Amy and took a small sip.

_Holy mother of fries! _It was coffee, yeah, but coffee with cinnamon and chocolate milk. It tasted like a warm winter morning spent indoors, complete with watching snowflakes swirl down outside the window. Ari grinned into the cup. "Thanks," he said.

"Yeah," Amy said, moving back to across the table from him. "I put cinnamon in mine, too, so I thought you would like it like that." She shrugged. "Jane puts strawberry milk and sugar in hers."

"It tastes delicious," Jane added, her eyes not once leaving the napkin covered in little marks drawn by mini pyros. "If we got strawberry milk more then I would be in heaven." Her forehead furrowed. "Only not really, because then I would be dead."

When one of the boys tapped her on the shoulder, she shut up and turned her attention back to the napkin, listening to whatever James and Peter were whispering about.

Ari and Amy were the only two kids who didn't talk for the while they ate. Alex and Wendy were still talking quietly, and James, Peter, and Jane hadn't looked up from their napkin. After a while, Ari broke the silence.

"Can you tell me about this place?" he asked Amy. _I might as well make myself useful while I'm here and _not _getting experimented on_, he reasoned. _I'll make Jeb and everyone proud if I get enough information._

Amy shrugged. "Sure," she said, as she slurped up the last of her spaghetti.

"Can't see why you find it interesting," she said through a mouth full of pasta. "Nothing ever happens here. But okay. This place is run by a guy named Dr Garcia, he's got gray hair and like five hundred granddaughters and he has to take pills or else his head will asplode."

"No, they're for his heart," Alex contradicted. "He has to take them or he'll get a stroke or something."

Amy scowled. "Maybe _some _of them are for his heart," she conceded. "But some of them are for his head, too."

"_No_, those are aspirins," Wendy told her. "For headaches."

Amy ignored the blonde. "_Anyway_. That's Dr Garcia. He's really strict and he observes us sometimes, but you'll prob'ly never see him because he stays in the other side of the School."

"After Dr Garcia there's Dr Howard. He's like the Vice President of the School and he's in charge of something important, which is why he stays here. Otherwise he would be back in Australia. He's the one that wears ridiculous shirts."

"I know Dr Howard," Ari said cautiously. "He's the one that met up with – met up with the Erasers that brought me here." Just thinking about it made him sink back into his seat, so he took a sip of the chocolate-and-cinnamon coffee to stop him from reliving the morning.

The coffee tasted good. Its chocolate flavor reminded him of the hot chocolate that he, Gazzy, Angel, and Nudge would pester Jeb to make on snowy mornings. Ari was almost so absorbed in his coffee that he forgets that Amy's talking to him.

"There's his friend, Miss Adila. She has three cats and an orange fish. She makes fun of him a lot, but Wendy thinks it's because she's in _looooove _with him." Amy over-exaggerated the last word, rolling her eyes as she did so.

"And then there's Dr Sally. She's really shy when she's around adults and she's pretty strict with the rules, but she got Jane a teddy bear once and she lets us fly outside if we stay close to the building."

"You mean you don't try to escape?" Ari blurted out, before he could help it.

Amy just looked at him like he was crazy. "Naaaah … why would we do that? This place is pretty good. We get to help sometimes, in the labs, they feed us and give us clothes, and if we don't do anything stupid, we don't get punished."

Jane interrupted. "You forgot about the failures." It was all she said, but the other five kids fell silent.

"Well," Amy said after a moment, "we aren't failures." She then turned her attention back to Ari.

"There are a couple of people that show up every few months or so. Like Reilly's girlfriend, who I told you about. And then there's this guy that Reilly hangs out with, I think they were friends in school or something? He works here, but in the tech department, so we don't see him that much. Uh, and then there's Agent Agent."

"That's not her real name," Alex said. "We just don't know what it is so we call her that."

"Wait, you mean it isn't her real name? I thought her last name was Agent!" Wendy interjected. "No, it was something from Star Wars." Her forehead creased. "I don't know."

Amy dismissed that with a wave of her hand. "Agent Agent. She brings donuts sometimes. Then there's Mister T, who doesn't really talk to us. He talks to Dr Sally and asks to look at files."

"His name isn't Mister T, though. It's Doctor Something. Michaels?" Alex tapped his fingers on the table, his now-empty plate of pasta pushed aside. Wendy's also-empty plate rested on top of it.

Amy shrugged. "Not sure. But he lets us call him Mister T, I think because his last name has a T in it. Or his first. Not sure."

Jane spoke up for the second time. "The bell's going to ring soon. Can I get a piggyback to the dorms?"

"_Fine_," Amy sighed. "Come on."

As she stood up to hoist the other girl onto her back, a harsh buzzer sounded, making Ari jump. He pushed aside his half-finished plate of pasta and watched as the kids with the freaky yellow eyes filed out of their tables and into the hallway. None of the bird kids moved until all of the others had left, and even then, their motions were subdued. Peter picked up the plates and dumped them into a garbage can, Alex stood up and scratched the back of his neck, and Amy headed for the door, carrying Jane.

Ari hurried to catch up with her, still curious. "So they don't do experiments on you here?" he asked.

Amy rolled her eyes and huffed out a breath. "_No_, I told you that already. The only thing they do sometimes is blood tests, and that's sitting in a chair and getting a smiley face band-aid after five minutes and a little pinch."

As they walked down the hallway, Ari glanced over his shoulder. James and Peter were engaged in a conversation so intense that they lagged ten feet behind. By the sound of it, they were debating about exploding watermelons. Alex was chatting with another girl—Ari stumbled for a second as he looked at her.

She had yellow eyes.

"Amy. Amy!" He jostled the bird girl's arm. "Alex, he's …"

"Alex can take care of himself," Amy said dismissively. "Besides, if Lacey beats him up it'll be his stupid fault for talking to her."

"Don't say that," Jane told her. "Lacey's the one nice kid in that batch."

Amy shrugged and walked into the dormitory, letting Jane slide off of her back into a bed.

"You coming, Grim Reaper?" she yelled out into the corridor.

"Shut up!" Alex yelled back. As he yelled, Peter and James walked into the dormitory, almost bumping into Amy. "Careful, you idiots," she warned them, glaring.

"Why's she so mad?" Ari whispered to Jane, who shrugged.

"I don't think she trusts them," Jane whispered back, before toeing off her sneakers, sliding under the covers, and falling asleep, leaving Ari to wonder who "they" were—the yellow-eyed kids, the mini-Flock, or Alex and Lacey.

He shrugged and sat down on a nearby bed. If he wasn't going to die anytime soon, he might as well try to sleep. The other kids were all getting ready for bed, too; some were wearing pajamas, while others just fell into beds fully clothed. Ari closed his eyes and curled into a ball, quickly dropping off into a nightmare.

He woke up not six hours later, his eyes snapping open. For a second, he thought that the Erasers of his dream had followed him into this deserted room, and he twisted wildly, landing on the floor with a harsh _thud _that trapped his right arm underneath his body. He scrambled up, trying to get to his feet, but his knees were unsteady beneath him and he fell again, this time flat on his face.

As he lay on the ground, becoming aware of the pain of falling twice and the general uncomfortable feeling of falling asleep in clothes, he heard breathing that was a bit quicker than the sleep-leaden inhalations that filled the room.

_Oh, god_. A cold, scared burst of energy ran through him. Was it Robert, awake and waiting for revenge? Was it some other yellow-eyed kid, just waiting for a chance to beat up the human kid? As he attempted to stand up for a third time, he looked around the room. No, he didn't see any hulking outlines that all of the yellow-eyes possessed. Ari breathed a sigh of relief, but kept up his guard.

"_Pssst_."

The hissing sound was enough to startle him, but the fact that it was accompanied by a poke to his head made Ari want to jump out of his skin. He was convinced that it was a monster, a snake-like beast from the bowels of the School, ready to feast on the flesh of a seven-year-old boy.

He whipped his head around. Amy was kneeling in her bed, the bunk on top of his, leaning out so she could poke him.

"Hey," she whispered when he saw her. "You too?"

"Me too what?" Ari took care to keep his voice down.

"Nightmares."

When he nodded, she slipped out of her bed, landing on her tiptoes like a cat and crawling to sit cross-legged in front of him. "What about?" she asked, like they were talking about the weather.

Ari shuddered as he sat to the ground, hugging his knees to his chest. He took deep breaths, just like he'd been taught. "Erasers."

Amy was silent, but she put her hand on his shoulder. After a while, she said, "They won't hurt you. I won't let them."

"You can't stop them," Ari told her, though he wished it were that simple.

"I know. But I'm fast. I'd grab you and run like a cheetah." Amy glowered fiercely as she said this, and thrust her chest and chin out defiantly. "Let's see them try to catch you."

Ari laughed, just a little, and Amy joined in after a minute.

"Come on," she said, standing and pulling on his shirt where she held it. "I'm going to show you something that makes me feel better. It's like Harry Potter and Spy Kids mixed into one."

Ari looked toward where she was leading him. "In the … _girl's _bathroom."

"Harry Potter," Amy repeated.

"The thing in the girl's bathroom in Harry Potter did not make anybody feel better," Ari told her, warily. Imagining hostile magic trolls, he started to slow down, but Amy pulled harder when he did so.

"This is a cool thing," she said as she pushed open the door and pulled him in. "Now, do you see that vent?" she asked as she pointed.

"Yes." Ari would have to be blind not to see it—it was a huge vent in the wall, about three feet above the bathroom stalls' walls. "I bet you could put a Golden Retriever in that thing."

"That's _not _what we're going to do." Amy headed over to the end of the bathroom, opened up the last stall, and disappeared inside. Ari followed, curious. She was stepping onto the toilet lid and hoisting herself up onto the thin wall that enclosed the toilet. From there, she carefully wedged the vent grate off.

"Come and catch this," she hissed, her voice strained. "It's hard to hold it without falling."

Ari snapped to, grabbing the large grate and setting it onto the floor next to the toilet, trying not to make a loud noise. Amy heaved a relieved sigh and clambered into the ventilation shaft. "This is the Spy Kids part," she told him, her eyes alight.

"And I just climb up there?"

"Yep."

So Ari scrambled up the toilet, onto the wall, and into the shaft, where Amy had graciously moved down so he would have enough room to enter. "This is really cool," he told her. "But how did you find it out?"

"I get up … at night," Amy said, already crawling down the shaft. "A lot. So I tried to go out into the building to explore, but they lock the door to our dorms, and the windows are always locked. Then I came in here, and I saw this and I was like … _cool_!" She raised her voice on the last word, and it echoed around them.

"Cool! Cool! Cool! Cool!"

"Ah, man, I forgot about that." Amy grimaced. "There's an echo in here. Keep your voice down."

"It's four in the morning," Ari said. "There are people _awake _at four in the morning?"

"Scientists are weird," Amy said as she crawled. "Now here, you can see the gym. We train here."

Ari peered out through a grate. Sure enough, an empty basketball court greeted his eyes. There were several treadmills and racks of free weights on the side, and the entire room was bathed in darkness, making it seem like a place where monsters lurked.

"And further down that way there's Administration," Amy added, pointing. "You wanna go see?"

"Yeah!" Never mind sleep, this was so much better. Ari smiled to himself as he followed Amy down the ventilation shaft, taking so many lefts and rights that he forgot where he came from or how to get back.

"Okay, so we're coming up on Administration right now. We're going to be over Dr Howard's cubicle."

"You sound like a tour guide," was the first thing that came out of Ari's mouth. Amy snickered.

"I _feel _like a tour guide. All we're missing are the cameras and postcards." She came to a stop in front of another grate. "That's Dr Howard—hey, why is he talking to Reilly?"

"Shhhh." Ari elbowed her and turned his attention to the two men beyond the grate.

"—don't think it's a good idea, sir, despite its potential. They haven't been prepped sufficiently." Reilly was speaking earnestly, seated across the desk from Dr Howard.

Dr Howard shrugged. "They aren't the only league of ankle-biters we've got in reserve. Nor are they particularly hard to come by."

"Dr Johnson put a lot of effort into their conditioning, nonetheless." Reilly brushed his dirty blonde hair away from his glasses with his right hand before continuing. "We might have to re-do all that work."

"Because we haven't got the little girl, it's not even definite that the child wonders will be showing up. We might not need to do anything." Dr Howard reached out over the table and clapped Reilly's shoulder. "Don't worry about it, mate."

"Yes, sir." Reilly looked at the table. "About the kid … what are we going to do with him?"

_Me? They're talking about me? _Ari leaned forward, pressing up against the grate. He pressed a bit too hard, and the grate began to slide out with a metallic scrape. If Amy hadn't grabbed him, he would have fallen right onto Dr Howard's desk, grate and all. As it was, the pair of them strained against the heavy grate and the force of gravity before setting the grate back in its proper position and immediately turning their attention back to the two doctors.

"With the others?" Reilly was asking.

Dr Howard shrugged. "Why not? There won't be a full metamorphosis, there isn't enough gene therapy to remedy that, but the results … well, they would be terribly interesting, to say the least."

"But sir, he's just a kid! He could die!"

"I hope they aren't talking about you," Amy whispered to Ari.

"Me, too," Ari whispered back. The floor of the ventilation shaft suddenly seemed colder and harder underneath his jean-clad knees, and he shivered.

Amy squeezed his hand hard enough to make bones slide together. "Don't worry. There are tons of kid mutants. Tons of boy mutants. There's even this one boy, he's got fish DNA and they're going to graft gills into him and let him go into some wildlife preserve they're setting up for mutants they don't need anymore. It's probably him they're talking about."

Ari shrugged. "I hope so."

"I _know _so. Nobody's gonna screw you up, Ari Batchelder. Not while me and the Flock are alive."

"Why? … wait, hold that. They're talking."

"It could be a great step forward in progress. Post-embryonic grafting has never been attempted on this scale, not without a genetic-manipulation precedent. This would put us in the Director's good graces. The Director's been skeptical of us since Jeb decided to bail on us with the brats." Dr Howard rested his elbows on the table. "Dig, mate?"

"Yes, sir." Reilly scratched the back of his neck. "Just …"

"I'll let you do the surgery," Dr Howard offered.

"Cool!" Reilly lifted his head immediately, and his glasses flashed in the harsh fluorescent lighting of the Administration wing.

Ari could have stayed and watched for hours, but Amy nudged his shoulder with her wing. "We have to go now," she said quietly. "It's been almost an hour."

"Okay. After you." Ari waited for Amy to crawl about ten feet in front of him and started following her before he asked her the question that had nagged him since they began talking, at four in the morning in the dark dormitory. "You said that you would look out for me. But you don't know me. Why?"

Amy shrugged. "You're my friend and that means that I'm the only person who gets to kick your butt. And I don't know. I feel like I can trust you, and I'm not wrong about stuff like that. Like for instance, you didn't try to sneak up on me when I beat up Robert." She twisted around and grinned at him. Ari grinned back.

They reached the girls' room in what felt like seconds, and Ari helped Amy hoist the grate back onto the ventilation shaft. As he was doing so, he lost his balance and teetered on top of the cubicle's wall. When he was about to fall, she snapped out her left wing and pinned him to the wall, bruising his face but stopping him from snapping his back.

"Thanks," he got out as best as he could with his face pressed against the wall.

Amy nodded. "You got your balance?" When he gave her a thumbs-up, she jumped off of the cubicle, neatly landing on the floor. Ari elected to scramble down in a more undignified fashion, holding tightly onto the cubicle as he stepped onto the toilet lid, and then sliding off of the toilet onto the floor.

As he followed Amy out of the bathroom, he yawned and stretched. Suddenly, he felt much more tired. "What time do we have to get up?" he asked her. He could feel his speech becoming more slurred.

Amy, too, seemed sleepier. "Um … seven? No, tomorrow's Sunday. Seven-thirty?"

"Okay." Ari didn't lie down on his bunk so much as trip over it and fall onto it. Amy after looking at her top bunk with some amused disdain, crashed next to him, pulled herself onto the bed, and fell asleep.

Ari slept where he fell, but even in his sleep he was slightly conscious of being pulled onto the small bunk so his feet didn't dangle.

For a second, he thought he was back home.

* * *

Updated the banner thing; photo is credited to .

Also updated the _story _thing, thank the gods for spring break.


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